Free Gift With Purchase on Shopify: Setup

A free gift with purchase on Shopify is built with the Buy X get Y discount, and it works, with one catch that decides whether you can use it as-is. This guide walks through the admin screens in order, names each setting the way Shopify labels it, covers what to do about inventory, and ends with a test-order checklist. If you want the concept first, including the FTC's rules on the word "free", read What Is a Free Gift With Purchase?. This page is the setup.

What Shopify gives you, and the catch

Shopify's Help Center describes Buy X get Y as a discount where customers buy the "X" items and the "Y" items receive the discount. For the discounted value on the Y items you pick Percentage, Amount off each, or Free. A gift is the Free option.

The catch is stated plainly on the same page: customers must add all items to their cart manually, and the free or discounted "get" item is never automatically added to the cart. So the discount makes the gift free, but the shopper has to put it in the cart. Everything below is about running the native discount well, and the last section is about removing that manual step.

Step by step in the Shopify admin

These are the steps Shopify lists for a discount code, with the labels as they appear. For an automatic discount you choose Automatic discount under Method and enter a name under Title instead of a code.

1. Open Discounts in the Shopify admin and click Create discount.
2. Under Select discount type, choose Buy X get Y.
3. Under Method, choose Discount code (and enter a code or click Generate random code) or Automatic discount (and enter a Title).
4. Under Customer buys, choose Minimum quantity of items or Minimum purchase amount and set the number. Then, under Any items from, choose Specific products or Specific collections and add them.
5. Under Customer gets, set the quantity (for a single gift, 1) and choose the gift product under Any items from.
6. Under At a discounted value, choose Free.
7. Optional: check Set the maximum number of uses per order and enter a limit.
8. Under Eligibility, choose who can use it: All customers, Specific customers, Customer segments, or Markets.
9. Optional: under Maximum discount uses, check Limit number of times this discount can be used in total and/or Limit to one per customer.
10. Optional: under Combinations, check the discount classes it can combine with.
11. Under Active dates, set a start date, and click Set end date if the gift is for a campaign.
12. Click Save.

Two behaviors from Shopify's page are worth knowing before you pick the numbers. Products count toward a minimum purchase amount at their full price, before any other discount is applied, but Shopify adds that an item already carrying another product discount does not count toward the minimum at all, so test your threshold against your sitewide sale. And if the same product is in both the buy and get lists, the lower-priced item the customer chooses is the one that is discounted.

Pick the gift and decide its inventory policy

The gift is a real product in your catalog with real stock, and Shopify says it is important to have adequate inventory when you offer free products. It also documents the failure case: if the inventory of the free product drops to zero, the product displays as sold out and the discount cannot be used. A popular gift can end your offer silently.

Decide three things before you launch:

• Gift cost. Use landed cost: unit cost, inbound freight, packaging and the extra pick-and-pack minute. That is what each redemption spends.
• Stock cap. Count how many gifts you can afford to give. If the total number of redemptions you can fund is 400, set Limit number of times this discount can be used in total to 400 and keep 400 units set aside.
• A fallback. Choose what you will do when the stock cap is reached, whether that is ending the offer or switching to a second gift product, and write down who does it.

Keep the gift a separate product, not a variant of something you sell at full price. Reports are cleaner, and the gift will not drain stock from a product shoppers also buy on its own.

Set a threshold that pays for the gift

The discount itself hides the economics: a Free gift is a discount equal to the gift's price, funded by the margin on the rest of the order. A quick check before you commit, with stated assumptions: suppose the gift costs you 4 dollars landed, your products carry a 55 percent gross margin, and the threshold is a 60 dollar cart. The margin on a 60 dollar order is 33 dollars, and 4 dollars of gift cost leaves 29 dollars, so the gift takes about 12 percent of that margin. If your typical order is 45 dollars and the threshold is 60, each shopper who stretches to qualify adds 15 dollars of revenue and about 8.25 dollars of margin, which pays for the gift twice over. If the threshold sits below your usual order, the gift is a plain discount on orders you were already getting. For the general break-even calculation, see Break-Even Discount: Extra Volume You Need.

Combinations and the automatic discount limit

Shopify groups discounts into three classes, product, order and shipping, and you choose which classes each discount can combine with. A gift discount that cannot combine with your sitewide sale will not apply at the same time as the sale, which is sometimes the intent and sometimes a support ticket. Decide on purpose.

Shopify's combination rules also set limits that matter to a store with many promotions: you can have a maximum of 25 active automatic discounts, and a customer can use at most 5 product or order discount codes and 1 shipping discount code on the same order. Stacking several product discounts on the same line item needs the Shopify Plus plan.

Tell the shopper to add the gift

Because the gift is never added for the shopper, the copy does the work the software does not. Put the instruction where the decision happens: on the product page ("Spend 60 dollars, then add the travel kit and it is free"), in the cart, and on the gift product's own page so a shopper who lands there knows it is only free with the qualifying order. If the discount is a code, say so next to the code field; if it is automatic, say that the price drops to zero once the cart qualifies. The FTC's guide on the word "free" asks for the conditions to be disclosed clearly at the outset, not in a footnote reached by an asterisk, so keep the threshold in the headline of the offer.

A test-order checklist before launch

Run these on a real storefront with a staging customer or a draft order flow before you announce anything:

1. Cart below the threshold with the gift added: the gift should be full price.
2. Cart exactly at the threshold with the gift added: the gift should be free.
3. Cart above the threshold with two gifts added: only the number you allowed should be free.
4. A qualifying cart with a second discount code: confirm the combination you chose.
5. The gift set to zero stock: confirm how the product page and cart look, as Shopify warns it shows as sold out.
6. An order placed twice by the same customer, if you set one use per customer.
7. The discount after its end date.
8. The checkout totals, to confirm the shipping rate you set still shows for the order once the free gift is in the cart.

Add the gift automatically

If you want the gift to appear in the cart without the shopper doing anything, the native discount cannot do it on its own. The Spend X, get a gift template in Freebies Engine by Log Studio Lab is described as "Shoppers who reach a cart value get a gift added automatically." Start from it, set the cart value from your own order data, and keep the stock cap you decided above. Plan requirements are listed on the pricing page. For a similar setup built on a two-for-one structure, see How to Create a BOGO Offer on Shopify.