WooCommerce order bumps that actually convert

What an order bump is, and what it is not

An order bump is a single small offer shown inside the checkout, accepted with one tick, which adds an item to the order the buyer is already placing. That is the whole idea, and every rule that follows comes out of it.

It gets confused with two other things constantly, and the three behave completely differently:

That last column is the part most guides skip. A bump is the only one of the three that can cost you the original order. Everything below is about making sure it does not.

Where it goes

Directly above the pay button, at the last step, after the buyer has entered their details and chosen how to pay.

The reasoning is about state of mind rather than pixels. By that point the buyer has stopped evaluating whether to buy and started executing a decision already made. A small addition to a purchase in progress is a much easier yes than a new purchase, which is the same psychology that sells extended warranties at tills and has nothing to do with ecommerce.

• Not at the top of the checkout. The buyer is still working. An offer there reads as an obstacle between them and the form.
• Not in the cart. That is a cross sell, and it competes with the decision to check out at all.
• Not on step one of a multi step flow. Put it on the payment step, where the total is already on screen.
• Not after payment. That is a post purchase upsell, a different and genuinely good mechanic, and it does not belong in the checkout form.

What to offer, and the price ceiling

Three rules. They are strict, and stores that ignore them report that bumps "do not work".

1. Cheap relative to the order

The usual working range is 10 to 30% of the cart value. A 15 dollar add on to a 90 dollar order is a rounding error to the buyer. The same 15 dollars on a 20 dollar order is a 75% increase, and now they are re evaluating the whole purchase, which is the exact thing you do not want happening on the payment step.

2. Obviously related, with the relationship stated

The buyer should not have to work out why they are being shown this. Coffee and filters. A camera and a memory card. A course and its workbook. If the connection needs a sentence of explanation, the bump has already lost, because nobody reads two sentences with their card in their hand.

3. No decision required

This is the rule that kills most bumps. If accepting it means choosing a size, a colour, a variant or a quantity, it is not a tick box any more, it is a second shopping trip. Offer one specific thing, in one specific configuration.

Things that work well as bumps, roughly in descending order: consumables the buyer will need anyway, warranties and protection plans, faster shipping, gift wrapping, a digital add on with no fulfilment cost, and a small quantity upgrade of what they are already buying.

Writing the bump

You have about two seconds and one line. The structure that works:

• A tick box label that states the offer, in the buyer's terms. "Add a spare filter for 8" not "Special one time offer".
• One line of why, concrete rather than promotional. "Most people replace theirs at three months" beats "Customers love this".
• The price, framed against something. "8, normally 12" works because it gives the number a reference point. If you are not discounting, do not invent a fake original price. That is a legal problem in several markets and a trust problem in all of them.
• A single image, small. It confirms what the thing is faster than the text does.

What to avoid: countdown timers on a checkout page, "only 2 left" scarcity you cannot substantiate, and anything pre ticked. A pre ticked bump generates chargebacks, refund requests and one star reviews, and in the EU it is not lawful under the consumer rights rules on pre selected options. The tick starts empty. Always.

Five mistakes that make bumps lose money

1. Offering something already in the cart. The fastest way to look like you are not paying attention. Your bump needs to check the cart contents and hide itself if the product is already there.
2. Offering something out of stock. The buyer ticks it, the order fails validation, and you have converted a completed sale into an error message. The bump should disappear silently when the product is unavailable.
3. Asking too much. Anything above roughly a third of the cart value reopens the buying decision.
4. Stacking bumps. Covered above, and it is the most common one. Two bumps do not double the revenue, they halve the attention.
5. Never taking it down. A bump the buyer has already declined, shown again on their next order and the one after that, is wallpaper. A frequency cap so it is asked once and then rests is worth more than a better headline.

The mechanics that are easy to get wrong

If you are building this yourself, this is the part that takes the time. None of it is visible in a screenshot, and all of it is visible in your accounts.

• Totals must recalculate immediately. The buyer ticks the box and the total updates in place, with no page reload and no "recalculate" button. WooCommerce replaces the order review fragment over AJAX for exactly this, so your bump has to live correctly with that refresh and re-bind afterwards.
• Price at the moment of render, not at the moment of setup. If you snapshot the price when the offer is configured, it silently drifts out of date every time you change the product. Re-read the live product on render, and re-check stock while you are there.
• Mark the line item. Write a meta value on the cart item saying "this came from a bump", and which bump. Without it you cannot tell six months later whether bumps made you any money, and you cannot handle refunds sensibly.
• Think about the refund case. A buyer refunding the main item usually expects the bump refunded too. Decide the policy before the first one lands, not during the first complaint.
• Untick has to work. Ticking is the easy half. Removing the item cleanly, restoring the total, and not leaving an orphan line in the order is where hand rolled implementations break.
• Do not let it move the pay button off screen. On a phone, a bump inserted above the button pushes the button down. If your primary action leaves the viewport when the bump renders, you have built a conversion loss with an upsell attached. How to check that properly is in why your WooCommerce checkout breaks on mobile.

How to tell whether it actually worked

Bumps are unusually easy to fool yourself about, because the headline metric always looks good. Average order value goes up. It nearly always goes up. That is not the question.

The question is whether total revenue went up, and there are three numbers in it:

• Take rate. Bump acceptances divided by checkouts that saw it. Somewhere in the high single digits to low twenties is a normal range for a well matched offer. Under 2% means the offer is wrong, not the design.
• Average order value, for orders that saw the bump.
• Checkout completion rate, and this is the one people forget. A bump sits between the buyer and the pay button. If completion drops by even a small amount, that loss applies to every order, and the bump revenue applies only to the ones who ticked. A 12% take rate on a 10 dollar add on does not survive a 2% fall in completion on a 90 dollar cart.

Where to start if you have never run one

Pick the least ambitious version, prove it does not hurt, then improve it.

1. Find your most common second item. Look at orders with two or more lines and find the thing that shows up most often alongside your best seller. That is your bump, and you did not have to guess.
2. Price it under 20% of your typical cart.
3. Write one label and one line. State the offer, state the price, say why in concrete terms.
4. Put it above the pay button, unticked, once.
5. Watch checkout completion for two weeks, not average order value. If completion holds, you have free money. If it dips, the offer is in the way and no amount of copy fixes that.