Cart Extras | minimum order surcharge and free gift with progress bar

About the Extension

A customer has £38 of goods in the cart. From £50 you would add a gift. He never finds out, because nothing in the cart says so. So he orders for £38.

The problem

An offer the customer cannot see does not change what he buys. The message sits on a landing page, in a banner or in last week's newsletter. The decision happens in the cart, and there it stays quiet. At the other end sits the tiny order: £12 of goods, plus picking, box, postage and paperwork. Nothing is left of it. Turning it away is not much of an option either.

The solution

This plugin puts both things where the decision is made. A progress bar runs in the cart with your own steps and a line like "Only £12.00 left to Gift". When the customer reaches a step, the plugin drops the free product or the discount into the cart by itself. When he stays below your minimum order value, a surcharge appears that covers exactly the amount he is short.

What's in it for you

Your customer knows what he is missing. Instead of doing the maths in his head he sees a bar, an amount and the name of the goal. Someone standing £12 short of a gift is far more likely to add another item than someone nobody told.

The offer fires without you. No voucher codes to hand out, nothing to release manually. Step reached, gift or discount is in the cart. Cart drops back below it, the item quietly disappears again.

The surcharge is dynamic, not a flat fee. £4 short means £4 surcharge. 40p short means 40p. Your customer never pays a penalty amount, and you still get your minimum order value.

Your tax figures stay right. The discount is spread proportionally across the tax rates of the items actually in the cart, even when 5% and 20% sit side by side. The surcharge carries the tax rate you assign to it. Net, gross and tax free carts are calculated separately.

Trade and retail stay apart. A master switch per sales channel decides where the plugin acts. Minimum order value in the trade channel, nothing at all in the retail shop. No uninstall needed for that.

No developer required. You maintain steps and thresholds in the administration and set the colours in the plugin settings. Nothing in your theme has to be touched by hand.

How the plugin works

After installation you get two new entries under Catalogues in the administration: "ProgressBar Steps" and "Dynamic Thresholds".

Under "Progress Bar Steps" you create as many steps as you like. Each one gets a name, an amount, a priority and a description that shows up as a tooltip in the cart. Under "Action" you pick "No action", "Discount" or "Free product". For a discount you choose between "Percentage (%)" and "Absolute amount" together with a currency, plus whether it replaces lower discounts or adds up with them, for a gift you pick the product and the quantity. You can attach a step to a Shopware rule, then it only applies to the customers that rule matches.

Under "Dynamic Thresholds" you define the surcharge: threshold amount, tax rate, the cart label your customer reads, and optionally a rule as well. Categories and shipping methods can be excluded. If you create several thresholds, the priority decides which one applies.

Bar colour and milestone colour live in the plugin settings, together with the option to show the minimum order value as its own step on the bar.

Typical use cases

A gift above a certain basket value. A cosmetics shop adds a travel size from £60. From the first item on, the customer sees how far away that is.

Minimum order value in a trade shop. A spare parts dealer charges a surcharge below £50 of goods. Pallet delivery is excluded, because different terms apply there anyway, and the surcharge gets the tax rate his accountant asks for.

A tiered campaign. 5% from £100, a gift from £150, 10% from £250. The bar shows all three goals and puts the nearest one first.

Technical facts for your IT team

Shopware 6.7, PHP 8.2 or newer. The plugin creates its own tables (swp_progress_bar_step and swp_threshold_config plus their translation and mapping tables) and leaves the Shopware tables untouched. It sends no data to external servers and stores no personal data, it reads the cart during the running request. Steps and thresholds are loaded once per cart calculation, product names and currency factors in one query each for all steps together. Errors go into a dedicated log channel (swp_cart_extras_six); if the bar fails, the cart is still rendered. Both areas ship their own privileges, so you grant them per role. On uninstall the standard Shopware option decides whether your data is kept or the tables are dropped.

To be honest

A step can grant a free product or a discount, there is no "free shipping from X" action as such — a step named "Free shipping" without a stored action is display only, it does not unlock anything by itself. If your theme has been heavily rebuilt, look at the bar in a test shop before you switch it on for real. The fastest way to find out is to try it.

Legal notice

We accept no liability for legal requirements. Please check the use of this plugin with a qualified legal advisor.