Promotions

Open a link in the editor and turn on Promotions to attach a reward to it. You can build anything from a flat 10% off to a ladder that gives more as the cart grows.

The discount function must be enabled in your Checkout Links settings for promotions to work. Discount codes are the exception — they use Shopify’s own discount system and work regardless of that setting, as long as the code is available to the Checkout Links sales channel.

How a promotion is built

Turn Promotions on and you get one promotion to start with. Each promotion has two parts:

Conditions — when it applies. A promotion with no conditions reads Always — these promotions apply to every cart and rewards every cart.
Discounts — what the customer gets. A promotion with none reads Nothing yet — this promotion gives no reward.

Click Add promotion for a second one, and the headers become Promotion #1, Promotion #2, and so on. Use the duplicate icon to copy one — it moves the new promotion’s threshold up for you, so building a ladder takes a few clicks.

Conditions

There are two kinds of condition, and a promotion can use one of each. With both, they must both be true.

Cart quantity — how many items are in the cart
Cart total — what the cart is worth

Each condition is either is at least (a minimum only) or is between (a minimum and a maximum). So “is at least 5 items” or “is between 5 and 10 items”.

Discount types

Click Add discount under a promotion and pick one. You can add as many as you like to a single promotion — 15% off and free shipping is two discounts on one promotion.

Discount — a percentage or a fixed amount. Choose Percentage or Fixed amount, then enter the amount.
Free shipping — waives the shipping cost.
Free gift — adds a product at no charge. Pick one product; if it has several variants, the customer chooses which one on the popup.
Discount code — auto-applies one of your existing Shopify discount codes. Search for it by name.

Discount and Free shipping both have an optional Message, which replaces the label the customer sees at checkout. Leave it blank and you get a sensible default such as 30% OFF or FREE SHIPPING.

When several promotions match at once

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is not what most people assume.

A promotion set to “is at least” has no upper bound, so a big cart matches the small promotions too. A cart of 10 items matches “at least 2”, “at least 5” and “at least 10”. What the customer gets then depends on the reward:

Discounts do not add up. The customer gets the single biggest one. With 10% at 2 items, 20% at 5 and 30% at 10, a 10-item cart gets 30% off — not 60%.
Free gifts do stack. Every promotion that matches grants its gift, so that same cart receives all three gifts if all three promotions offer one.
Free shipping applies if any matching promotion grants it.

This is deliberate: a ladder should feel like an upgrade, not a pile-up. Customers move up to a better discount rather than accumulating several.

If you want a discount to apply only within a range, give its condition a maximum with is between. “Between 5 and 9 items” stops matching at 10.

Scope — what counts toward the condition

Inside each condition is a Scope setting that decides which cart items are counted:

from the whole cart — everything the customer has
from the link’s items — only the products the link itself added
from a collection — only products in the collections you pick
from specific products — only the products you pick

Scope belongs to the link, not to one promotion, so changing it anywhere changes it everywhere on that link.

A new link starts sensibly: a storefront link counts the whole cart, because the customer builds it themselves, while a checkout link counts the link’s own items, because you chose them.

Applies to — what the discount lands on

A Discount has its own Applies to setting, separate from Scope. Scope decides what counts; Applies to decides what gets discounted.

That split is what makes offers like “buy any 2 items, get 10% off plants” possible — the condition counts the whole cart, and the discount only touches the plants.

The options are on the whole cart, on the link’s items, on a collection, or on specific products. A discount’s own choice wins over the link’s Scope.

Prices in other currencies

If your store sells in more than one currency, any money field — a Cart total threshold, or a Fixed amount discount — can carry an exact amount per currency.

Click the currency icon beside the field, pick a currency, and type the amount. Each one you set appears as a chip under the field, like EUR 45. Remove a chip and that currency goes back to being converted from your base price.

Set one where a converted number would look wrong. A €45 threshold unlocks at exactly €45, rather than at whatever today’s rate makes of your base amount.

Shops that sell in a single currency never see this — the currency button only appears when there is another currency to choose.

Warnings you might see

Promotions scoped to collections or products check themselves as you build, and will tell you when something won’t work:

Not on the sales channel — a collection has to be available to the Checkout Links sales channel to be discounted. Use Make available in the warning to fix it without leaving the page.
Only some products available — the collection is on the channel but some of its products aren’t. Those products won’t be discounted.
Too many products — a targeted collection can hold up to 500 products. For anything larger, use Specific products instead.
Nothing chosen — you picked collections or products as the scope but haven’t chosen any yet, so the promotions would apply to nothing.

If your link has a popup, its product blocks can carry their own discounts. Those appear at the bottom of the Promotions card as a read-only list marked set in the popup’s product block, so you can see everything the link gives away in one place. Edit them in the popup editor, not here.

If a product gets a discount from both its popup block and a promotion, the two combine rather than adding — 50% off from the block and 20% from a promotion comes out as 60% off, not 70%.

Tips

Give the top promotion of a ladder a genuinely better reward, since the lower ones stop mattering once it matches.
Use is between when an offer is meant for a specific range rather than everything above it.
On a storefront link, turn on the Checkout Links app embed so customers see the offer and their progress toward it while they shop.
Set a schedule on the link if the offer has an end date, rather than remembering to switch it off.