How to add lottery, competition or lucky draw with prizes to your WooCommerce store

Have you ever purchased lottery or entered lucky draw? Every now and then there is occasion to reward your customers with prizes or give opportunity to enter the draw for an item (with huge discount or for just a fraction of real price). E-store owners who run their webshops on WooCommerce can improve their user experience, boost sales and get more traffic with thousands of plugins and practically with couple of clicks add new premium feature to their store. Our WooCommerce Lottery plugin does just that – implements lotteries in WooCommerce based store.  We will describe here what do you need to setup lottery in your webshop which runs on Woo.

Here we will assume you allready have working WordPress website hosted somewhere (if not contact us for help with hosting), domain name and WooCommerce installed with payment processor set up. Other requirements are true cronjobs (just ask your host support to setup cronjobs needed) if you want to have reliable way to send email notifications and end lotteries on time.

Now to get your first lottery online you need to follow couple of simple steps:

  1. you need to purchase and download WooCommerce Lottery plugin here
  2. install lottery plugin as any other plugin in WordPress (follow installation instructions here if you are not sure how to install WordPress plugin)
  3. after plugin activation you will need to go to Producst -> Add new product to setup your first lottery on your website. This part should look like screenshot below. Here you populate details like descriptions and prize for your lottery / competition / draw, min and max number of tickets, max tickets per user, number of winners, price, start / end date, image etc.
  4. Once you publish your first lottery your customers will be able to participate in the draw after they purchase and complete order for ticket(s). On this link here you can see our demo website example and how lottery will look like for customer (this depends on your WordPress theme ofcourse). This part is also customizable via WooCommerce templates and theme’s custom CSS.
  5. So your lottery is running till the date you set in its details. Right after end date and if you reached your min tickets limit plugin will draw winner or winners using PHP’s mt_rand function which provides solid randomization and gives everyone equal chance for winning. Winner(s) will get email notification about winning the prize, others will get better luck next time notification while site owner gets notification about finished or failed lottery. Here site owner usually also contacts winner to define details and deliver the prize.

Some owners want ticket pick or question / answer feature (or manually choose winners when you use 3rd party number generator) which can be added via WooCommerce Lottery Pick Ticket Number Modification (here is how pick number mod looks like). Others would like to end lottery and draw prize as soon as all tickets are sold, change countdown format or disable mixing lotteries with normal products – this is just a matter of changing a setting in Lottery Settings (there are plenty of settings which allows quick customization).

If you installed Lottery plugin and have some questions or encountered a problem which you cannot solve yourself there is always documentation which covers all the details and support which will help you with issues. In case you have a question drop us mail here.