Discount types

You might want to use discounts as a way to promote sales, special offers, or as customer loyalty rewards. You can create discounts for orders, products, or shipping. The following discount types are available:

  • You can create a discount code or an automatic discount to offer buy X get Y
  • You can create a discount code or an automatic discount to offer an amount off
  • You can create a discount code or an automatic discount to offer free shipping

Managing discount codes

You can offer your customers an amount off discount on products, collections, or variants in your store. If you sell online, then you can offer buy X get Y discounts to encourage customers to buy items.

When you create a new discount code, it displays on the Discounts page in your Shopify admin. To distribute this discount code, you can send the code to your customers by email, or display it on your online store. Your customers need to enter the code during checkout to receive the discount.

When you create a discount code, you can configure the following details:

  • the dates for which the code is valid
  • the number of times that a code can be used
  • a minimum order amount before the code can be used
  • which products, collections, or variants the discount can be applied to
  • if the discount combines with other discount classes

Your customers can redeem discount codes in your online store. Except for buy X get Y discounts, your customers can also redeem discount codes in person if you're using Shopify POS.

All Shopify plans include discount codes.

After your discount codes are set up, you can use the Sales by discount report to find out how often your discount codes are being used.

Considerations for creating discount codes

Before you create a discount code, review the following considerations:

  • A discount code can apply to up to 100 specific customers, products, and variants.
  • There's a limit of 20,000,000 unique discount codes for each store.
  • To ensure that discount code names are added correctly to your store's checkout URL, avoid using special characters in the name of the discount code.
  • Collections can't contain individual variants. If you add a product variant to a discounted collection, then the discount applies to every version of the product.
  • If you create a discount with a start and end time, then the time is based on the time zone that you selected in your Shopify admin. For example, if your store’s time zone is Eastern Standard Time (EST) and you select a start date of November 26, then your discount starts at 12:00 a.m. EST on November 26.
  • A discount with the maximum use of one per customer applies only to that specific discount. If you delete that discount and then add in a duplicate with the same maximum use restriction, then customers who used the previous discount can also use this new discount one time.

Automatic discounts

You can offer your customers discounts that apply automatically at checkout and on cart. You can create amount off, free shipping, or buy X get Y automatic discounts.

For an automatic discount to apply correctly, your customers need to add all eligible items to their carts before they move to checkout. This includes the items that they need to buy to qualify for the discount as well as the items that they get as part of the promotion.

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