Discount Codes vs. Automatic Discounts

When creating discounts through Shopify or Abra, you have two methods available —  manual codes or automatic discounts.

With Shopify, the difference between the two is obvious — one is manually entered at cart or checkout by the customer, and the other is added automatically.

With Abra, we have a system that allows many more modes for applying discounts — by a private link (Private visibility), by customer tag (Customer account visibility) or even to all the visitors on your website (Public visibility). In each of these scenarios, Abra adds the discount code for your customer without the need for an automatic discount, once the Abra promotion is activated through one of the modes. In fact, automatic discounts can sometimes cause issues and unpredictability when multiple discount functions or combinations are involved. We recommend using automatic discounts in very specific cases, keeping in mind that they will always apply to everyone at checkout.

When thinking through access for your promotion it can be helpful to consider storefront experience and checkout and where they overlap.

Note:

An Abra promotion controls the full storefront experience, including promotional banners, dynamic pricing, and applying discounts to cart and checkout. In contrast, a discount only affects the cart and checkout, without any visual or pricing changes on the storefront itself.

Below we outline when to use a manual code vs. automatic discount with Abra based on your desired customer experience and promotion goals.

When to use Manual Discount Codes vs. Automatic Discounts with Abra

When using Abra, Automatic Discounts are not a requirement and in most cases a manual discount code is a better solution.

Gift with purchase discounts require an Abra promotion to be activated in order for the free gift to be automatically added to an eligible cart as part of the promotion’s storefront experience. Simply creating a gift with purchase discount as an automatic discount will not add the free gift at checkout.

Private promotions using automatic discounts will no longer be private and be applied for all customers in cart and checkout. Additionally, due to Shopify API limitations, automatic discounts cannot be activated based on the customer segment.

These situations are easy to handle when you use manual discount codes with Abra promotions.

When to Use an Automatic Discount

Where automatic discount codes can be most helpful is with a public promotion with no restrictions. Automatic discounts can be a foolproof way of ensuring they apply to everyone and across all devices. These can be created with any of our complex discount functions such as volume discounts, multi-value discounts or multi-class discounts.

Automatic discounts can also be helpful when creating bulk or volume discounts across many different collections of products without the need for activating a promotion, and in particular when you want those bulk discounts to work independently of any other promotions you are running concurrently.