How to Create Variant Specific Discounts in Shopify Store

In the world of e-commerce, offering discounts is a powerful tool to drive sales and attract customers. However, Shopify store owners often face challenges when trying to create discount rules for specific product variants. This article will explore the current limitations, available solutions, and potential future developments for creating variant-specific discounts in Shopify.

Understanding Shopify’s Discount Limitations

The Collection Conundrum

One of the primary challenges Shopify store owners face is the inability to create collections based on specific variants. Collections in Shopify can only be created from complete products, which limits the flexibility of discount rules.

The 100-Variant Limit

When setting up discount rules for specific product variants, Shopify imposes an upper limit of 100 items. This restriction applies to both manual and automatic discounts, which can be problematic for stores with large inventories or numerous variants.

Impact on Marketing Strategies

These limitations can significantly impact a store’s ability to implement targeted marketing strategies, especially for businesses with extensive product catalogs or those looking to promote specific sizes, colors, or other variant-based attributes.

Current Solutions for Variant-Specific Discounts

Using Shopify’s Built-in Discount Feature

Despite the limitations, Shopify does offer a way to create discounts for specific variants:

1. Create a new discount
2. Select “Applies To > Specific Product”
3. Choose the variants you want to apply the discount to

This method works well for stores with fewer than 100 variants but becomes challenging for larger inventories.

Altering Prices Per Variant

While not a discount rule per se, store owners can manually adjust prices for individual variants to create a “sale” effect. This approach, however, lacks the automation and flexibility of true discount rules.

Third-Party Apps

Several Shopify apps have been developed to address the variant discount limitation. Apps like Selly and Quantity X offer more flexible solutions for creating discounts based on variants, even for stores with over 100 variants.

Workarounds and Best Practices

Segmenting Products

For stores with large inventories, consider segmenting your products into smaller groups and creating separate discount codes for each group. This can help you stay within the 100-variant limit while still offering targeted discounts.

Utilizing Tags and Collections

While you can’t create collections based on variants, you can use product tags strategically to group similar variants together. This can make it easier to apply discounts to specific groups of products.

Combining Discount Strategies

Consider combining different discount strategies, such as using automatic discounts for broad promotions and manual discount codes for more targeted offers on specific variants.

Future Developments and Feature Requests

Shopify’s Ongoing Improvements

Shopify is continuously working to improve its platform based on user feedback. While there’s no official timeline for implementing variant-based collections or removing the 100-variant limit, these features are frequently requested by store owners.

Staying Informed

To keep up with the latest updates and feature releases, regularly check Shopify’s changelog at https://www.shopify.com/changelog. This resource provides information on new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Submitting Feature Requests

Shopify encourages users to submit feature requests. By voicing your needs and challenges, you can contribute to the platform’s evolution and potentially see improvements in variant-based discounting in the future.

Conclusion

While creating discounts for specific variants in Shopify comes with certain limitations, there are several workarounds and third-party solutions available. By understanding these constraints and exploring alternative approaches, store owners can still implement effective discount strategies to drive sales and engage customers. As Shopify continues to evolve, we may see more robust native solutions for variant-specific discounts in the future. In the meantime, leveraging the available tools and staying informed about platform updates will help you maximize your discount strategy’s effectiveness.