How to Add Custom Fees to Your WooCommerce Checkout

As an online store owner, you may be looking at different ways to increase your revenue and customer loyalty. You should consider adding custom fees to checkout – it’s an effective tactic to drive up sales, revenue, and trust.

You could, for example, have a custom fee for personalizing a product or shipping a product internationally. Or offer a discount to a repeat customer or on a cart amount that reaches a certain value.

This article will also cover how to configure various types of additional fees, including payment gateway fees and different shipping method fees, to further enhance your WooCommerce store’s functionality and flexibility.

In this post, we tell you how you can set up WooCommerce additional fees on checkout. Let’s start by looking at why you should have a WooCommerce checkout fee in the first place.

Why add a WooCommerce custom fee?

There are many instances in which adding a WooCommerce checkout fee is justified and beneficial for your business. Here are just a few examples to go over in understanding how you can put extra fees to use for your eCommerce store.

• To offset your shipping expenses: If you ship large or bulky items to customers in far-off countries, your shipping costs will be higher than if you were delivering to a local customer. You can pass on the extra cost to customers to protect your margins with WooCommerce additional fees on checkout.
• To account for additional labor costs: Tips are customary in the hospitality industry, and add meaningful income to waiters/servers. WooCommerce custom fees are also a means to reward additional efforts or man hours to make a product, such as custom furniture, and can be envisioned for many eCommerce niches.
• To add a personalization charge: Customizing a product takes time and money as you’ll have to alter the product based on customers’ requirements. If you take customization requests, you can deliver products as per customers’ needs while also keeping your own costs low with a WooCommerce checkout fee.
• To ensure faster shipping: 48% of customers say they are fine paying more for an item if it can be delivered quickly. If you promise same-day or next-day delivery, you can quite easily have WooCommerce additional fees on checkout in exchange for faster delivery speeds.
• To balance out transaction and payment gateway fees: Whether you use PayPal, Stripe, or another payment processor, you will incur a fee every time a transaction is made at your online store. It’s worth exploring the addition of WooCommerce custom fees to reduce or compensate for the fees you have to pay, including handling fees and payment gateway fees.
• To soften the blow of high raw material costs: Rising input costs can be partially passed on to customers. This will work especially well for B2B niches where there’s an understanding among all parties in the supply chain, including the end customer, about price trends and their impacts.

Apart from these scenarios, there are others in which WooCommerce additional fees on checkout can make a difference to your costs and revenue. It’s important to add here that while adding a custom fee in WooCommerce is no doubt a great strategy, you should ensure more transparency into extra costs by labeling them appropriately and adding them under the subtotal at checkout.

How do you add WooCommerce checkout fees?

You can use code to customize your WooCommerce site. However, make errors during the process and you run the risk of breaking your site. We recommend code-level customizations to add WooCommerce custom fees only if you’re an experienced web developer with PHP/CSS expertise.

In our experience, plugins are the easiest way to add extra fees functionality in WooCommerce. The good news is that there are many plugins available for this exact purpose, and they make your job a lot faster and simpler.

Best plugins for applying WooCommerce additional fees on checkout

While planning a custom fee strategy using a plugin, you want to make sure you have the flexibility to create fees based on a number of conditions, and be able to do it without hassle. In addition, you want to track the outcomes of your strategy and have the hard facts on whether your WooCommerce custom fees are generating more income for you. All of this is possible by using WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin from DotStore. These plugins also allow for customization of fees based on the shipping method chosen by the customer, enhancing the checkout process and providing a tailored shopping experience.

WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin from Dotstore

WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin is the best way to apply fees based on custom variables, including the following:

• Fixed, percentage, or dynamic variables
• Location
• Stock
• Cart subtotal
• Conditional rules like handling fees
• Product categories
• Tags
• Variable products
• User behavior, purchase history, or another variable
• User roles (customer, sales agent, or other)
• Cart make-up (weight, quantity, and other)
• Payment gateway
• Shipping class
• Shipping method
• Multiple extra fees
• Minimum and maximum product quantities
• Tiered products

You can import or export the extra fees you’ve determined, saving you time and energy. You can apply the WooCommerce custom fees right away or schedule them for the future. This way you don’t have to set a reminder or mentally make a note to add them at the predetermined time.

An income report dashboard allows you to track the income you’ve generated from your WooCommerce checkout fee strategy. You can quickly identify what’s bringing you more money and understand the impact of adding a certain fee on payment conversion, and the proportion of visitors to your site that convert to paying customers. The insights you gain from the income report can extend your customer research and inform your customer engagement and marketing strategies.

WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin from DotStore has a 99% customer satisfaction rating, and over 11,000 active premium users. The plugin starts from $129/year for a single site, with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Why not test it out now using the live demo?

Other plugins that apply WooCommerce additional fees on checkout are:

Extra Fees for WooCommerce by FantasticPlugins

This plugin comes with many features but not to the extent of DotStore’s product. You can assign the following types of WooCommerce checkout fee:

• WooCommerce add fee to order when the cart subtotal is within a particular limit
• Payment gateway fee
• A fee for each of your WooCommerce products
• A fee based on a percentage of the product price
• Fixed fee or percentage fee
• Restrictions on particular products, categories, users, shipping methods, and order total
• Multiple order fees
• Minimum and maximum range

The plugin does not support applying fees based on time, location, date, or weight. It also doesn’t support tiered pricing or fee scheduling, among other things. You can, however, access reports showing you the fees you’ve collected from your set-up.

WooCommerce Advanced Fees by Ace Plugins

This plugin lets you use conditional logic to add checkout fees to your WooCommerce store. You can configure rules to apply fees based on the following conditions: 

• Products
• Categories
• Shipping classes
• User
• Shipping destination
• Specific payment gateway
• Item weight (minimum and maximum)
• Item quantity (minimum and maximum)
• Subtotal (minimum and maximum)

You can add negative or positive fees, use condition grouping for complex rules, and schedule publishing of fees. Although the features of this plugin and DotStore’s WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin overlap, it is less flexible overall and more difficult to configure. It also misses out on a reporting dashboard, which means you have no easy way of knowing how much income your WooCommerce add fee to order strategy is generating for you.

WooCommerce Extra Fees Options Pro by Terry Tsang

This WooCommerce plugin allows you to add multiple extra fees to any order. You can add WooCommerce additional fees on checkout based on the cart total. However, this is only for a minimum order, when the cart total is less than or equal to the specific amount. Other options include applying fees to payment gateways and shipping methods. These features, while useful for any online store owner, aren’t adequate and don’t allow you the flexibility for an advanced extra fee set-up.

Applying WooCommerce additional fees on checkout using WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin

You can add multiple rules for a product, apply a discount on an existing fee or tack on to it, include volume discounts or shipping charges, and more. Here’s a visual guide to the WooCommerce add fee to order functionality of the DotStore solution.

Create rules to levy fees at checkout based on country, state, and zip code

Shipping to a far-off destination? Charge a higher fee at checkout. Delivering locally? Adjust the fee downwards.

So, if you’re adding a £15 fee for shipping products to Alaska, USA, and specifically to certain postcodes, including 10001, it will reflect as ‘international fees’ on the front end and automatically get added to the subtotal. You can label the fee as you like.

Hide/Disable fees when a discount is applied

In a 2020 survey of consumers in the United States, 88% of respondents said they had used coupons for shopping. Offering coupon codes encourages people to complete their purchase. If you’re offering coupons and want to remove all extra charges when a buyer applies the coupon code, you simply have to check ‘Remove fees once a 100% discount applies’.

In WooCommerce, add a fee to your orders for a weekend delivery. If this is £15, it will show up if the buyer doesn’t have a 100% coupon code to apply.

But say a sales agent or a VIP customer has applied the generous 100% discount coupon you’re offering. In this case, you may also want to remove the weekend fee, and only charge them the flat rate shipping fee. If you have enabled this rule, the extra weekend fees will not appear on the checkout page.

Advanced fees on top of the extra fee

You can configure the plugin to add an extra fee over the base additional fee you’ve already set up for a product, with multiple other conditions in place. Say you have an extra fee of £3 for a cap. You can define a rule for a percentage-based increase of 10% on the cart subtotal when someone adds a cap in a certain quantity (1 to 5 caps) to their cart.

For a cart subtotal of £80, the customer will see the special product fee (you can label it however you like) of £11.

In WooCommerce, adding a custom fee doesn’t always imply that you have to increase the total price. You can also incentivize the purchase of a larger quantity of a product by applying a discount on the existing fee (volume discount). It only requires you to add the desired negative value (-) on the plugin dashboard.

Taking the same example, say you want to reduce the extra fee of £3 by -£6 when someone purchases at least 6 caps and a maximum of 10. You just have to input ‘-6’ under ‘Fee amount’ and you’re set.

Based on this advanced rule, not only will the extra fee be eliminated but the buyer will also receive a discount of £3 on their order.

Dynamic fee rules

You can add dynamic fee rules based on product quantity, cost, and weight. This is easy to do, requiring you to use [qty] for quantity-based dynamic fee rules.

The correct amount of the product-based extra fee will be calculated and appear separately to show the breakdown of the total cost. For example, you can apply a £10 fee to the total quantity in the cart, say 3 items, for a total fee of £30.

You can set up an additional fee on your WooCommerce orders linked to the cost of the item. To enable this dynamic item cost-based fee rule, you have to select [cost] from the dropdown. If the cart contains an item costing £20 and you set an extra fee of £4, then it would be 4 + [cost] or £24.

In WooCommerce, add a custom fee based on item weight to compensate for any cost you need to bear. It’s possible with a WordPress custom hook, but faster and easier with the WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin. For this, use [weight] under fees and the plugin will make the appropriate calculation.

Product-specific subtotal

A ‘WooCommerce add custom fee’ rule can also apply to specific products and their subtotals, appearing with other items in cart. This is an option to consider when you want to offset the shipping costs you will bear for sending a bigger quantity of a bulky or relatively heavy item. In the example below, this rule has been applied to hoodies with a logo when the subtotal reaches $399 or more for this product.

If the order contains six quantities of a hoodie with a logo, then it won’t qualify for the extra fee as the subtotal is less than £399.

However, if the order quantity increases to 9, raising the subtotal for the hoodies to £405, then a bulk order charge of £19.99 will apply.

Set-up extra fees, boost revenue

Adding extra fees in WooCommerce and labeling them accurately can help you bring in more income from your online store. WooCommerce additional fees on checkout can work as incentives for customers to buy in bulk or satisfy cart value requirements. Either way, you benefit monetarily, and by applying fees consistently, you strengthen customers’ trust in your business.

While there are many WooCommerce plugins that offer this functionality, DotStore’s WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin is the complete solution for any online store. It works equally well for stores with few products and variants, and those with complex product catalogs.

If you’ve been looking to add WooCommerce additional fees on checkout for customizing your products, extra labor, to offset volatile raw material costs, or if you want to set up prices based on customer profiles and purchase histories, you can get started with the plugin straight away!

The WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin allows you to set conditional rules based on a number of pre-set variables. This flexibility means you can think up creative ways to apply fees or offer incentives. For example, if you sell products that aren’t generally returned or exchanged but you’re willing to offer customers the option, you could apply a fee that protects you even as you stand out from competitors.

The solution is easy to set up and backed by exceptional customer support. Users have only positive things to say about WooCommerce Extra Fees Plugin:

“Great plugin and A-M-A-Z-I-N-G support!! It’s the only plugin that I found that really works to make conditional fees at checkout once per order, and not for each product selected. And it really works great, and is easy to use. Very helpful if you have some products that you have to add a service fee or extra shipping charge but want to add this fee only once per order. Super friendly and extremely fast support. There was a language issue in my shop with my theme, within a few hours they already updated the plugin and solved the issue. I am very thankful for this great service and the plugin.”

“We installed the Extra Fees plugin and had an issue with the PayPal plugin. DotStore support managed to figure out the problem and contact the PayPal plugin developers about errors they found in their code. Talk about above and beyond the call of duty! They also recommended another PayPal plugin that is compatible and I installed it and all is well. Thanks DotStore!”

Pricing starts at $129 for one site.