October 3, 2026
Go to Discounts in the admin, click Create discount, and choose Automatic discount instead of Discount code. Set the discount type, percentage, fixed amount, or buy X get Y, define which products or collections it applies to, set minimum purchase requirements if you want them, and schedule the active dates. The discount then applies itself in the cart with no code entry. The part most stores get wrong is not the creation but the stacking: automatic discounts combine with each other and with code discounts under specific rules, and the order you set determines which combination the customer actually gets.
Automatic discounts are for promotions you want everyone eligible to receive without friction: sitewide sales, buy-one-get-one offers, free shipping thresholds, volume pricing. The customer never enters anything, which removes the most common discount failure, the shopper who never saw the code or typed it wrong.
Code discounts are for targeted or gated promotions: influencer codes, welcome offers in email flows, affiliate tracking, anything where you need to know which channel drove the sale. Codes give you attribution that automatic discounts cannot, because the code itself identifies the source.
You can run both at once, and most stores should. A typical setup is an automatic discount for the storewide sale plus code discounts for specific partners or segments. The complexity comes from how they interact, which is the next thing to understand.
Shopify applies discounts in a fixed priority order. Automatic discounts apply first, in the order you arrange them on the Discounts page, then discount codes apply after. Within automatic discounts, only one of each discount class applies to a given line item by default: one percentage or fixed-amount discount per line, one buy-X-get-Y per line, one free-shipping discount per order. The discount with the highest priority in the list wins when two automatics could apply to the same item.
This means the order of your automatic discounts is a business decision, not just a list. If you have a 20 percent sitewide sale and a buy-one-get-one on a specific collection, the arrangement decides what a shopper buying from that collection pays. Drag them into priority order on the Discounts page and think through the overlap cases before a sale goes live.
Discount codes stack on top of automatic discounts unless you configure otherwise. A customer can get your automatic 20 percent off and then apply their influencer's 10 percent code, which may be exactly what you want or a margin disaster, depending on the plan. Each discount has a combinations setting where you control what it can combine with. Set these deliberately for every discount, not just the big sale ones.
Start in the admin under Discounts. Create discount, choose Automatic discount. Give it a clear internal name, something like "Oct Sale 20pct sitewide," because six months from now you will have a dozen discounts and the name is how you tell them apart.
Choose the discount type. Percentage is the most common for sales; fixed amount works for dollar-off promotions; buy X get Y handles bundle offers; free shipping covers shipping thresholds. For buy X get Y, define the customer-buys and customer-gets quantities carefully, and decide whether the free items come from the same products or any products.
Set eligibility. Apply to all products for a sitewide sale, or narrow it to specific products, collections, or variants for targeted offers. Add minimum requirements if the promotion needs them, a minimum purchase amount or quantity, and decide whether the discount applies once per order or to every eligible item.
Set the schedule. Discounts can start and end automatically, which matters more than it sounds: manually remembering to turn off a sale is how stores accidentally discount for an extra week. Set the end date and time, in the store's timezone, and double check it against your marketing calendar.
Every discount deserves a test order before launch. Create the discount, then walk through the exact scenarios your customers will hit: the eligible product alone, the eligible product with an ineligible one, the minimum threshold exactly met and just missed, the discount combined with an active code. Check the cart math in each case against what you intended.
Test on the storefront, not just in the admin preview. Discounts render in the cart drawer, the cart page, and checkout, and the display can differ between them. A discount that applies correctly but displays confusingly still generates support tickets.
Document the combination rules somewhere your team can see them. When a customer emails asking why their code did not stack with the sale, the support agent needs the answer in seconds, not after digging through discount settings. A one-page reference of active discounts and their stacking rules pays for itself in the first sale.
The biggest is overlapping automatics with no priority thought, which produces cart math nobody intended and usually favors the customer. The second is forgetting the schedule, the sale that never ends because nobody set an end date. The third is creating the discount but never testing the combination cases, which is how margin leaks hide until the finance review.
Also watch the discount name versus the customer-facing display. The internal title you set is not what the shopper sees; the checkout shows a discount label you can customize. Set a clear customer-facing label, "October Sale, 20% off," so the cart confirms the promotion the shopper expected rather than showing a cryptic internal name.
Automatic discounts are the lowest-friction promotion tool Shopify offers, and the setup takes minutes. The work that matters is the thinking around them: which discounts stack, in what priority, with what combinations, tested against real cart scenarios before launch. Get the stacking right and automatic discounts run your promotions on rails; get it wrong and the cart math writes checks your margins cannot cash.
Automatic discounts apply themselves at checkout when the conditions are met, with no code for the customer to enter or forget. Code discounts require the shopper to type the code, which suits sharing through email, influencers, and print. The choice is about friction and control: automatic for sitewide promotions, codes for targeted ones.
Shopify allows combining discounts within rules you set, by discount class, such as product, order, and shipping discounts stacking together. Whether a specific pair combines depends on your settings for each discount. Test your exact promotions with a real cart before launch, because stacking behavior surprises merchants more than any other discount feature.
Forgetting the discount is live. An automatic promotion with no end date, or one that overlaps a later sale, quietly stacks into margins nobody planned. Set end dates, name discounts by campaign and month, and review the active list monthly. Discount discipline is a calendar habit, not a launch task.