Discount Types

Choosing a Type#

xDiscount has exactly four discount types. You pick one per discount, in the Discount type dropdown on the discount form, and the choice decides which value fields appear underneath it.

All four apply automatically at checkout, shoppers never enter a code. At checkout the discount is labelled simply xDiscount, on every type, and the amount is printed by Shopify next to it.

What Every Discount Has in Common#

Whichever type you choose, the form is the same shape. Go to Discounts and click Create discount.

1. Title: a Name, which only you see. It is how you find the discount later.
2. Included products: click Browse, or Choose products in the empty state, to open Shopify’s product picker. This is the set the discount attaches to. Pick a product and leave its variants alone and the discount covers every variant, now and in the future. Pick specific variants and the form tells you so, with “1 product is limited to specific variants.”
3. Discount configuration: the Discount type dropdown above, its value field, Skip products that are out of stock, and Priority, which defaults to 10.
4. Discount period: an optional Start date and End date. Both are inclusive, both work on their own, and a start equal to the end is a legal one-day sale. Dates follow your store’s timezone, not yours and not the shopper’s.
5. Conditions: optional Item quantity, Cart value and Inventory rows. Each type can be used once per discount, so three rows is the maximum.
6. Status, in the right-hand column: Draft, Active or Archived. New discounts start as Draft.
7. Click Save.

Scheduling is not a condition. There is exactly one place to put a discount on a calendar, and that is Discount period. The Condition dropdown offers Item quantity, Cart value and Inventory, and nothing else. A discount you saved before this changed may still carry a read-only Date range (set in Schedule) row, kept so older discounts keep running as they were. Nothing can be switched to that type and a new row can never be one, so to retire it, copy its dates into Discount period, delete the row and save. See Conditions and Rules for the full picture.

Percentage Off#

Reach for it when you want the discount to scale with the price of what the shopper bought.

Field: Percentage off, entered as a number with a % suffix. The allowed range is 0 to 100 inclusive. Save anything outside it and you get “Percentage must be between 0 and 100.”

How to set one up:

Worked example. A $50 mug and an $80 kettle are both targeted at 20% off. A shopper buys 2 mugs and 1 kettle.

At checkout each line shows an xDiscount line. The percentage is the same number everywhere: the admin, the storefront offer card and checkout all hold it to 0 to 100, so what a shopper is shown and what they are charged cannot drift apart.

Fixed Amount Off#

Reach for it when you want a headline number. “$10 off” reads stronger than “13.4% off”.

Field: Amount off, a money field in your store’s currency, entered in whole currency units, so dollars rather than cents.

The one thing to know: the amount comes off each item, not each line. A $10-off discount on a line of 3 takes off $30, not $10.

How to set one up:

Worked example. $10 off a $120 jacket, and the shopper buys 2:

Selling in more than one currency? You enter the amount in your store’s currency, and xDiscount converts it to the shopper’s currency at checkout using Shopify’s own exchange rate, rounded to that currency’s decimal places, so yen and won come out as whole numbers. The storefront offer card has no exchange rate to work with, so whenever the shopper’s cart is in a different currency from your store’s, it shows your figure with your currency code appended, for example “10 USD off”, rather than dressing your number up in the shopper’s symbol. When the cart is in your own currency the card formats it normally.

Buy X Get Y#

This is the type with the most moving parts, so read this section before you build one.

What it actually is: a percentage off a gift the shopper has added to the cart. A Shopify discount function cannot put a product into a cart by itself, so xDiscount does not “add a free item”. The storefront offer card gives the shopper a button that adds the gift, and the discount then takes the configured percentage off it.

Three things must all be true, or nothing happens:

The form says so itself: “Buy X get Y needs the storefront offer card installed on your theme. A discount cannot add an item to the cart on its own, so the card is what puts the gift there.” The card is included on every plan, Free included, so this is a setup step rather than an upgrade.

The fields

• Percentage off the gift, from 0 to 100. Enter 100 for a genuinely free gift, and 50 makes it half price.
• Number of gift items, minimum 1. This is the cap on discounted gift units across the whole cart, and it is also the quantity the gift button adds in a single click.
• Gift products, chosen with Choose gift products. Until you do, the form warns: “No gift chosen yet, shoppers cannot claim this offer until you pick one.” Once chosen it reads “2 gift products, the shopper picks from these on the product page.”
• Which variants a gift offers is chosen in the same picker as the discount’s products. Tick a product whole and shoppers choose any of its variants in the gift window on the product page; open the product and tick specific variants to limit the choice to those. The form says what each gift offers — All 4 variants, including any added later or 2 of 4 variants — and checkout only ever discounts a gift variant you allowed, whatever a shopper’s browser claims. Products another active or draft discount covers or gives away are not offered, one discount per product in both directions, but a discount’s own products are: buy two of this, get one of this is allowed and common.

How to set one up:

Worked example, end to end. The shopper opens the Coffee Maker page. The offer card shows a tile with the discount’s name and Free gift on the right, and under it a Choose your free gift button. They click it, a window lists the Filter Pack with an Add button, they click Add, and one Filter Pack lands in the cart marked as a gift. At checkout:

Caps, and what the shopper cannot do

• Number of gift items is counted across the entire cart, not per line. Set it to 1 and a shopper who raises the gift line to 5 gets one unit discounted and pays for the other four.
• If the number is missing or unusable, the cap is treated as 1, never as unlimited.
• The gift is only discounted if it is one of the products you listed under Gift products for that discount. Any other line marked as a gift is ignored.
• A line marked as a gift never counts as the trigger, so a shopper cannot claim a gift without buying the trigger product.

The gift products themselves need no setup. They do not have to be selected under Included products, and they do not get an offer card of their own. The gift picker only appears on the pages of the trigger products.

Common ways it goes wrong

Free Shipping#

Reach for it when shipping cost is what is stopping the sale.

Fields: none. Choosing Free shipping replaces the value field with a single line: “Shipping is free when this discount applies.”

How to set one up:

How it behaves at checkout. If any line in the cart carries an eligible free-shipping discount, shipping goes to 100% off, one discount per delivery group the cart has, so a split shipment is free on every part of it. It is a shipping discount rather than a product discount, so it can sit alongside a percentage or fixed-amount discount on the same order.

Worked example. A $75 minimum-cart-value free-shipping discount on bikes: a shopper with a $90 bike sees shipping drop to $0.00, and a shopper with a $60 bike pays the normal rate.

When Several Discounts Match#

• Only one product discount applies per item. Among the discounts that match a line, the one with the lowest Priority number wins and the rest are ignored for that line. Priority defaults to 10, and a discount saved with no priority is treated as 999.
• Free shipping is judged separately, so a line can be discounted and the order can still ship free, from two different discounts.
• Order matters more than you would expect. Because only the single lowest-priority discount is considered for a line, a Free shipping or Buy X get Y discount with a lower priority number than a Percentage off discount on the same product will suppress that percentage. Give your free-shipping and gift discounts a higher priority number than your price discounts on the same products.

What Happens When Something Is Off#

xDiscount is deliberately cautious at checkout: anything it cannot judge with confidence results in no discount, never a guessed one. A date it cannot read, a value it cannot parse, an exchange rate it cannot trust, each of these means the discount quietly does not apply rather than applying the wrong amount. If a discount is not showing up at checkout, that caution is usually the reason, and the Sync state on the Discounts page is the first place to look. See Managing Discounts for what each sync state means.