The Shopify admin lets you create discount codes and automatic discounts, and for most promotions that is enough. Discount apps cover what it cannot do: change the prices of a whole catalogue and change them back, charge less per unit when a larger quantity is purchased, put a free gift into the cart, keep a coupon off the items that are already reduced.
This guide starts with what the admin does on its own, and then goes through six discount apps: what each one does, what it costs, and when it is the right choice.
Start with what the Shopify admin already lets you do
Every Shopify plan lets you create two kinds of discount. A discount code is typed by the customer or applied through a link; an automatic discount applies on its own as soon as the cart qualifies. Both come as a percentage off, a fixed amount off, free shipping, or Buy X get Y. You can require a minimum spend, limit the offer to a collection or a customer segment, allow one use per customer, and set start and end dates.
You can also run a sale on prices instead of on a discount: lower the product price and move the old price into the compare-at field, which is what produces the crossed-out price. Our guide to Shopify discounts compares the two approaches in full.
But the Shopify admin also has limits, and they force most stores to install an app. The four biggest limitations are these.
- Twenty-five active automatic discounts per store, app-created ones included. A store with thirty collections cannot give each collection its own automatic offer.
- One code per discount. The admin creates a single code per discount, meaning that personal codes for your customer base require you to create thousands of codes and thousands of discount campaigns.
- No automatic rollback. If you lower product prices for a clearance or a BFCM sale, Shopify cannot roll those prices back for you, which leads to manual updates, manual testing and errors.
- Two product discounts never apply to the same item unless you are on Shopify Plus. A 10% automatic discount across the store and a 15% code for VIP customers do not add up to 25%: the customer gets one of the two, which might not be the promotion design you have in mind.
And so on: the more complicated the promotion, the more of it you end up doing by hand.
Pick the app by the job, not by the name
| The job | App | Price | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Put a catalogue on sale and restore the prices after | Alpha Sale | Free – $25.99/mo | 4.9 (304) |
| Volume and tiered pricing | Discounty | Free – $49.90/mo | 4.9 (1,250) |
| Free gift with purchase, BOGO | BOGOS | Free – $109.99/mo | 5.0 (4,396) |
| Product bundles and mix-and-match | FBP Fast Bundle | Free – $139/mo | 5.0 (3,452) |
| Automatic discounts that stack, and POS discounts | AIOD | $9.99 – $24.99/mo | 4.7 (364) |
| Thousands of unique single-use codes | Bulk Discount Code Bot | Free – $99/mo | 4.9 (274) |
Alpha Sale: sale prices in bulk, scheduling and coupon control
Alpha Sale on the Shopify App Store — 4.9 stars from 304 reviews, Built for Shopify.
Alpha Sale changes prices in bulk and reverts them. You pick the products, set the discount and set the dates. The app writes the sale price and the compare-at price on every product in the campaign, so crossed-out prices show on product pages, collection pages and in POS. When the campaign ends, the app puts back the prices the products had before, including a compare-at price a product already carried.
- Scheduling and repeats. Run the campaign now, between two dates, or every week or every month. The app can also round the new prices, so $37.43 becomes $37.99.
- Targeting with exclusions. Choose products by collection, vendor, product type or tag, combine the conditions with AND/OR, and list what stays at full price.
- Maximum discount amount and item limit on coupons. A 20% code takes $400 off a $2,000 order. You can set a maximum amount, and then the code stops at the sum you choose. You can also limit the code to a few items in the order, either the most expensive ones or the cheapest, instead of the whole cart.
- Code blocking on sale products. A jacket already reduced from $120 to $84 does not take another 20% from a welcome code. One setting controls this. You can block the products that are on sale from the coupon, or you can allow only the biggest of the two discounts to apply.
- Announcement bar and cart widget. The announcement bar on top of the page appears when the campaign starts and goes away when it ends. The savings widget in the cart shows the customer how much the sale took off.
- Regular price at checkout. The original price shows next to the discounted one on the checkout page. Normally a change to the checkout is only available to Shopify Plus stores, but this feature in Alpha Sale works for any store on any plan.
- Sale prices in fixed-price markets. If you sell abroad with a fixed price list per market, most discount apps leave those markets at full price. Alpha Sale puts the sale prices there too.
The free plan covers 10 discounted products a month and one campaign — enough to put one collection on sale and watch the prices come back. Paid plans go by catalogue size: $9.99 for 100 discounted products a month, $17.99 for 500, $25.99 for unlimited, with the advanced code-blocking rules and the fixed-price markets on the top plan. More on the bulk price editor and on blocking coupons on sale items.
Alpha Sale does not do volume or tiered pricing, bundles, BOGO offers or wholesale price lists. The next four apps cover those jobs.
Discounty: volume pricing and scheduled bulk price edits
Discounty on the Shopify App Store — 4.9 stars from 1,250 reviews.
Discounty is of great help if you are trying to build a quantity break offer, that is, a price table on the product page: one unit for $9, three units for $24, six units for $42. Shopify does not let you do this, while Discounty builds that table and shows it on the product page, together with sale badges and a countdown timer when the offer has an end date. The same app also schedules bulk price edits, runs BOGO, free shipping and cart-goal discounts, targets customer segments, and separates the online store from POS.
Plans are limited by discounted variants and by campaigns running at once: free covers 10 variants and 3 campaigns, $9.90 covers 150 variants and 10 campaigns, $29.90 covers 1,000 variants, $49.90 covers 10,000. A shirt in five sizes and three colours counts as fifteen variants, so a plan measured in variants runs out much faster than you would expect from the number of products.
BOGOS: free gift with purchase and BOGO
BOGOS on the Shopify App Store — 5.0 stars from 4,396 reviews, the largest review count here.
Shopify’s own Buy X get Y never puts the free item in the cart — the customer has to add it. BOGOS adds the gift for the customer, or opens a popup where the customer chooses one. The app also covers buy X get Y, mix and match, a bundle builder, volume and tiered discounts, and a discount on the cheapest item in the cart. To promote the offer it can show a progress bar, an announcement bar and a separate offers page, and the offers also work in POS and on headless storefronts.
The free plan covers 30 orders for the store’s lifetime. Paid plans are limited by the orders an offer touches each month: $29.99 for 300, $49.99 for 600, $109.99 for 2,000 on Shopify Plus. So if your store, for example, is running 500 orders a month, the right plan for you is the $49.99 one.
FBP Fast Bundle: bundles, mix-and-match and build-a-box
FBP Fast Bundle on the Shopify App Store — 5.0 stars from 3,452 reviews.
Shopify has its own free bundles app, which makes fixed bundles and multipacks and keeps the stock of the components in sync. However, it only makes fixed sets, so the customer cannot pick which three shirts go in the box.
Fast Bundle covers mix-and-match, build-a-box, gift and subscription boxes, variant bundles, frequently-bought-together blocks and cross-sells, with quantity breaks and tiered pricing inside a bundle. The offer can appear on the product page, in the cart drawer or in a popup, custom CSS is allowed, and the app A/B tests offers in ten languages and several currencies.
Plans are limited by the sales the bundles produce: $19 a month covers $1,000 of monthly bundle sales, $49 covers $3,000, and $139 covers $10,000. On the top plan you pay about 1.4% of the revenue the plan allows.
AIOD: automatic discounts that stack, online and in POS
AIOD on the Shopify App Store — 4.7 stars from 364 reviews.
AIOD is for stores that want discounts to combine rather than replace each other. It stacks a native Shopify code with its own automatic offers — a 10% welcome code on top of a quantity discount — and runs bundle, quantity, wholesale and BOGO discounts alongside. It adds the free gift to the cart, and shows the shopper how far the cart is from the next tier: $100 for 10% off, $200 for 20%. Discounts reach Shopify POS, including offers that apply at one location only, and the app pairs with the same developer’s payment and shipping rule apps.
Plans are $9.99, $14.99 and $24.99 a month with a 15-day trial, and the listing shows the same features on all three — ask support which limit the higher tiers buy.
Bulk Discount Code Bot: thousands of codes that work once each
Bulk Discount Code Bot on the Shopify App Store — 4.9 stars from 274 reviews, Built for Shopify, by Seguno.
A single coupon that you send to your whole customer base leaks to coupon sites fairly quickly. On a $900 order a 20% code is $180 that you meant to give to one new customer. If unauthorised use is a threat to your revenue, you may want to hand every customer a unique code instead. That creates a new problem: in the Shopify admin every unique code needs its own discount campaign, so a mailing turns into thousands of campaigns. This is where Bulk Discount Code Bot helps.
The app generates the unique codes, imports codes you already have, exports the batch to CSV for an email or SMS tool, and reports revenue, redemptions and average order value by campaign and channel. It also audits the discounts already in the store for missing expiry dates, missing usage limits and eligibility left open to everyone.
Free for three sets of codes, $19 a month for unlimited generation, $99 for the reporting, the CSV export, the audit and the Klaviyo and Gorgias integrations.
Best Shopify discount apps FAQ
What is the best discount app for Shopify?
The best app is the one that covers the job you cannot do in the admin. Alpha Sale runs storewide sales and restores the prices afterwards. Discounty builds quantity breaks on the product page. BOGOS puts the free gift into the cart for the customer. Fast Bundle builds mix-and-match bundles. AIOD lets several discounts apply to the same order. Bulk Discount Code Bot creates thousands of single-use codes at once.
Can I run discounts on Shopify without an app?
Yes, and many stores should. Codes, automatic discounts, free shipping, Buy X get Y, minimum spend, customer segments and scheduled dates are all in the admin on every plan. An app is worth paying for when you need what is not there: bulk price changes with a rollback, quantity breaks, bundles, codes in bulk, or control over what stacks.
Why is my discount code applying to items that are already on sale?
Because a sale price is not a discount, so Shopify’s combination settings see no conflict between them. A jacket cut from $120 to $84, plus a 20% code, goes out at $67.20 — 44% off the price you meant to sell at. To avoid this, the easiest way is to use an app like Alpha Sale.
How many automatic discounts can I run at once?
Twenty-five per store, and discounts created by an app count towards the same twenty-five. Codes are not limited this way.
Will a discount app slow my store down?
It depends on where the app does its work. An app that writes prices into your products, or runs the discount inside Shopify’s checkout, adds nothing to the page the shopper loads. An app that calculates prices in the browser adds a script to every product page — measure that before a season, not during one.
Every app on this page lists the same discount types on its listing. The real difference is what you still do by hand after installing it: restoring the prices, chasing the gift the customer never added, keeping the coupon off the products that are already reduced, pasting codes into a spreadsheet one at a time.
If that manual work is your catalogue, and you want to discount collections at once, put the prices back on a schedule and keep coupons off the products that are already reduced, then that is what Alpha Sale does. There is a free plan, so you can try it on this season’s campaign.