Selling strategies

A selling strategy is a means of promoting the sales of products, often through applying discounts or other deals, and defining alternative payment and fulfillment schedules. Merchants might use multiple strategies at the same time to encourage conversion and drive sales.

Selling strategies are a key component of a merchant's marketing and conversion tactics, as they can provide additional incentives for customers to check out and become returning customers.

How it works

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Apps can help merchants to create, update, and manage selling strategies, such as discounts, product bundles, and purchase options.

Discounts

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Discounts enable merchants to offer to their customers a certain percentage or fixed-amount off of the products, order, or shipping when the customer meets specified conditions. Discounts are often used in marketing and promotions, or during seasonal sales to drive conversion.

There are two main discount types:

Automatic discount: A discount that's automatically applied at checkout and on a cart if prerequisites are met.
Code discount: A discount that customers can redeem using a specific code. Merchants can create and share discount codes individually with customers.

Shopify's native discounts include Buy X Get Y, Spend X Get Y, percentage, fixed-amount, and free shipping discounts, but you can also create custom discount experiences using Shopify Functions.

Learn more about discounts.

Product bundles

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Product bundles enable products to be grouped together and sold as a single unit. This selling strategy helps merchants to increase average order value, decrease marketing and distribution costs, and reduce inventory waste.

Merchants can create two types of bundles:

Fixed bundles: Shopify’s default implementation to support basic bundle use cases across Shopify’s ecosystem. These include Standard bundles and Multipack bundles that fit within Shopify’s variant limits.
Customized bundles: Used for more complex use cases, particularly when offering more choices to customers, or modelling a more complex composition of products, such as Mix-and-match bundles.

Learn more about bundles.

Purchase options

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A purchase option determines how customers can buy products from a store. Purchase options can help merchants manage cash flow and inventory, have flexibility on product launches, and diversify marketing strategies.

Purchase options include subscriptions and deferred purchase options.

Subscriptions

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Subscriptions enable customers to purchase products on a recurring basis. Subscription apps enable developers and merchants to build subscription experiences directly into Shopify's checkout, and create dashboards that enable merchants to manage their active subscriptions.

There are two main types of subscriptions:

Pay-per-delivery subscription: Pay for products for each delivery. New orders are created at regular intervals. This option is also known as "Subscribe and save".
Pre-paid subscription: Make a single payment upfront and receive products on a regular cadence until the order is fulfilled.

Learn more about subscriptions.

Deferred purchase options

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Deferred purchase options enable customers to buy products with deferred payments or deliveries. This helps customers to be more flexible with their payments and fulfillment options.

Deferred purchase options include the following types:

Pre-order: Place an order for products or variants that haven't been released yet.
Try before you buy: Try products before completing payment, and send back the products that aren't wanted.

Learn more about deferred purchase options.

Build options

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You can customize how merchants can merchandise their products using multiple technologies, including the GraphQL Admin API, Shopify Functions, and app extensions.

For a detailed breakdown of the available technologies for creating custom selling strategy experiences, refer to Options for building selling strategies.