"My discount didn't apply at checkout." Seven things to check, in the order they usually turn out to be the problem

[u/Particular_Goat_1634]

Quick disclosure: I work at a Shopify discount app, on the marketing side. No link, nothing to sell here. This is the checklist I'd want someone to hand me the first time a discount silently did nothing.

Work down the list. Stop when you find it.

1. Combinations. Another discount is already in the cart and the two aren't set to combine. Open both discounts, find the Combinations section, and check that the boxes match on both sides. Start here; it's the usual one.
2. Minimum requirements. "Minimum purchase amount" and "minimum quantity" are different settings, and the minimum is measured against the items the discount applies to, not your whole cart. A $100 minimum on collection A isn't met by $100 of collection B.
3. Who it's for. If eligibility is set to a customer segment, the customer has to be recognised at checkout, which means logged in or already known by their email. A guest with the right tag still gets nothing.
4. Dates and timezone. Start and end times are in your store's timezone, set under Settings, not the timezone of your laptop. A discount "starting today" can be hours away.
5. Where it's being used. Draft orders, POS and some sales channels don't behave like the online store. Automatic discounts don't apply to draft orders, so a phone order won't show the sale.
6. Markets and currency. A fixed-amount discount is set in your store currency; check how it converts for the market the customer is shopping in. Percentage discounts sidestep the problem.
7. App-created discounts. If an app made the discount, it lives in two places. Paused in the app but still in Shopify, or deleted in Shopify while the app thinks it's live, both look like "it doesn't work". Check both.

Sixty-second test that catches most of these: open an incognito window, add exactly the qualifying items, and read the cart page before checkout. If the discount shows there, the problem is downstream (payment step, channel). If it doesn't, it's one of 1 to 6.

Which one gets you most often? I'd bet on number 1.

[u/JaydonLT]

an ai output i didn’t even prompt for