There once was a time when opening a store meant starting a brick-and-mortar business — but not anymore. These days, being a store owner is as simple as creating a website. In this new age of technology, online shopping is the new normal.
In fact, 63% of all shopping starts online. Most consumers browse the internet before making their online purchase or going into a physical store location.
One of the most well-known eCommerce platforms is Shopify. However, there are Shopify discount limitations that store owners must abide by, which are harmful to their business. To learn more about these limitations, keep reading the information below.
The truth is, customers like discounts. If a shopper feels that they're getting a good deal, chances are they'll jump at the opportunity to buy something they want. There is a huge misconception that if store owners offer promotions, their profits will decline. However, discounts are a huge incentive for customers and they significantly improve profit margins.
With that said, here are a few reasons why offering discounts is effective:
The first order of business for driving sales is to get customers to go to your online store. Unfortunately, a lot of traffic doesn't always convert into a sale, especially when new visitors are browsing. However, promotions are still a great way to get the traffic flowing to your site and creating potential purchases.
It's a good idea to offer incentives to new customers by giving them a percentage off their first order. By doing this, not only will you get a potential customer, they are more likely to return later if they don't buy anything on that day.
Plus, you can incorporate email capturing to gather emails and send campaigns for future sales.
If you had a traditional brick-and-mortar store, your objective would be to entice customers, right? You'd either put up a sale sign or have someone standing outside and asking customers to come into the store. Well, the same works for an online business.
One of the best ways to engage customers is by providing pop-up promotions to potential buyers. You can offer free shipping, complimentary gift wrapping, or anything you'd like. By doing so, it enhances the shopper's experience.
Not only are they buying something that they want, but they also are getting more bang for their buck. These are the type of things that keep customers happy.
When it comes to running a successful business, the objective is to get repeat customers. It might be great to sell one item, but to sell multiple items is better. Offering discounts lures repeat buyers.
So, if you always offer free shipping on a certain purchase amount or periodic 20% off sales, you can expect customers to keep coming back. Also, to ensure that the money continues to roll in, make sure that all of your promotions aren't dedicated to first-time customers only.
Offering promotions to customers puts you in the retail game among all of the other pros. Essentially, it’s smart business. Not to mention, word of mouth is helpful. If you offer discounts, customers are more likely to tell their family and friends about your company.
To take it a step further, it's also a good idea to offer discounts to a particular group of people. For instance, during Mother's Day, you can offer a discount to single mothers. You can also provide deals to military service members.
Running these types of promotions tells your customer base that you care about helping people in need.
If you have a weekly, monthly, or annual sales goal, running promotions can help. When business is slow, you may miss the mark for that quarter. However, offering discounts to customers is a great way to grab extra sales that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
While Shopify does allow store owners to create promotions, there are some methods that aren't possible. These are due to limitations in the software that can prevent you from creating the promotion you imagine. Below are the Shopify limitations for discount codes:
Shopify does not allow stackable discounts. Their software is not built for allowing more than one discount to be used per order, even if you want to allow it.
As a substitute for not being able to offer customers multiple discounts, store owners can give them gift cards with a balance that's equal to the amount of the discount code. However, per Shopify rules, most discounts can't be applied to gift cards.
Also, discounts that are applied to collections won't go towards the gift cards within the collection. These limitations prevent customers from getting the most out of their shopping experience. All of the stipulations control what store owners can give their buyers and limit the items that customers can buy for a discounted price.
Only one discount is applicable per order. This creates an issue for customers because they have to choose which discount to use.
Not to mention, it takes your power away as a shop owner. You should have the right to allow your customers to use multiple discounts.
According to Shopify discount limitations, only one active automatic discount is allowed at a time. Automatic discounts supersede over regular discount codes and cannot be used at the same time. Furthermore, discount codes are not an option for customers with automatic discounts applied to their checkout orders.
With Shopify, if you want to give your customers more perks, the software doesn't allow it. Unfortunately, if you desire to do something special for your loyal customers, you have to figure out other ways to do it.
The Shopify platform's limit on stackable discounts includes promotions for free shipping. For instance, if a buyer has a 10% off code, they can't use it in conjunction with a free shipping discount.
Free shipping is a huge attraction for online customers, and there are different ways to handle it. Some businesses prefer to create a free shipping threshold the customer's order must meet. Others prefer to offer a free shipping coupon from time to time, or set up a free shipping promotion.
Unfortunately, in Shopify, free shipping coupons and promotions can't be used with other coupons because of the non-stackable limit. So by offering a free shipping event on your store, you'll be preventing your customers from using any coupon codes they have. The free shipping promotion will conflict with other coupons.
Another one of the Shopify limitations is that collections don't hold individual product variants. Therefore, if you add a variant to a discounted collection, the discount applies to every product variant in the collection. For example, if you have a collection of women's t-shirts, you can't apply a reduced price to the XL shirts only.
Not being able to put discounts on certain variants causes an issue for shop owners. What if you want to run a promotion because your XL shirts aren't selling as much as the other sizes? Not only that, if the discount code applies to all the variants, you run the risk of selling items that you don't want to discount or oversell.
Another inconvenient feature of Shopify is how it applies discounts to multiple items. If a product-specific discount code is used, it’ll go towards all of the products in the cart.
For instance, if a customer orders five of the same product, then the discount code will apply towards all five items.
This is a huge inconvenience for store owners. It would better if there was a way to customize the cart so that discounts are only applied to one product or a certain limit of the same item. Unfortunately, that's not an option for Shopify businesses.
When it comes to running a successful business, it's important to remember that consumers have a choice of where they spend their money. Your goal is to make them want to shop at your store.
However, it's hard to do that if your shop is set up on a platform with so many limitations. The last thing you want is for customers to abandon the items in their cart because they couldn't use their coupon code as well as receive free shipping. Sadly, you can lose a lot of business by not having the flexibility to offer stackable discounts.
Not to mention, as a business owner, you should have the ability to run your store any way you see fit. If that means allowing customers to use multiple coupons, then that's your choice.
As previously stated, sometimes running promotions can help you sell more items, reach sales goals, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to worry about silly restrictions that can limit the success of your business?
If you answered yes to that question, then it's time to make the switch to the best eCommerce platform for selling online.
Shift4Shop is an easy-to-use eCommerce solution for selling products online. Our eCommerce platform helps internet store owners by providing simple, yet effective software that you can customize to your liking. Plus, Shift4Shop allows business owners to provide multiple discounts to customers.
In Shift4Shop, you have full control over your coupons and other promotions. You can set up any discount code however you see fit. Each discount can be made stackable or non-stackable so you can allow different combinations of discounts as needed. So, for example, your customer can apply their "new customer 10% off" coupon with a free shipping coupon without having to choose between one or the other.
No matter how you want to set up your promotions, you can do things in Shift4Shop that are simply impossible in Shopify. Shift4Shop gives much more freedom, because our software is built for giving the power to the store owner.
Hopefully, this information about Shopify discount limitations helps you understand how much their restrictions could be hurting your business. If you are looking for ways to take your power back as an online business, Shift4Shop can help.
Shift4Shop is the best Shopify alternative available today. Our software is not only more versatile, but more affordable. We offer an unlimited, free eCommerce plan and we never add transaction fees on top of your payment processing fees. Plus, we have dozens more features built in, so you can spend less on third-party apps.
There is nothing Shopify can do that Shift4Shop can't do for a lower cost with less restrictions. If you want to save money for your business and have more control over how you run your online store, Shift4Shop is the answer.