When you create a discount in Shopify for your eCommerce business you'll often want to exclude certain products from those discount codes.
Unfortunately, you can’t exclude products from a Shopify discount only include. I love Shopify, but their discount engine definitely leaves a bit to be desired. You do have some more options if you’re on Shopify Plus, but it’s not through the native admin discounts, you have to create discount scripts which require some coding knowledge and can be a little finicky.
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But, when it comes to excluding specific items your best bet is to create an automated collection that only has the products that are eligible for discounts and then assign the discount code to that collection instead of their entire order.
How you create this collection is going to depend on the products you want to exclude and how your data is set up.
When creating an automated collection you have a few different conditions you can use
- product title
- product type
- product vendor
- product tag
- price
- compare at price
- weight
- inventory stock
- variant title
In my previous gig the only thing we ever excluded from discounts were certain brands or vendors that had rules against that – so I just created an automated collection that excluded products with specific vendors. And then, on our marketing we always mentioned in the disclaimer that these brands were excluded from discounts.
But what if you just want to exclude a handful of specific products and you don’t have any existing data to differentiate them from the rest of the products?
Well, that can get a little more cumbersome but it can still be done.
And in most cases you’re going to want to use the product tags or the product title. The unfortunate thing about the product tag filter, is that the only option is tag is equal to, so you would have to tag every product that you wanted in that collection vs. just excluding the ones that had a specific product tag.
This is also a step you would have to add into your product upload process to ensure that collection stays updated. The good news though, is that you can add tags to products in bulk so at least the initial set up wouldn’t be too too bad.
If it’s only a handful of products that you want to exclude, then you might be better off using the product title. When you use this filter you can say – product title doesn’t equal. So you would add a condition for each specific product you want to exclude from the discount and then just make sure it’s set to match all conditions.
Sadly, there’s no perfect solution but these methods will get the job done.
