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Discounts and pricing: what's possible

What pricing shapes MBC Bundles can produce, what it can't, and the rules that decide which discount type you're offered.

Written by Andrey Gadashevich

The four discount methods

  • No discount. Available on all structures. Items are bundled at regular price; any reduction comes from your own separate Shopify discounts.

  • Standard discount. Available on all structures, but narrows with your configuration — see below. Percentage, Sale price, or Amount off, applied to the Bundle subtotal amount or to Individual product price.

  • Tiered discount. Available on Widget-only Product bundles with Optional products or the Quantity selector turned on. A percentage per quantity tier, with no sale-price or amount-off form.

  • Free gift. Available when Optional products is off, or on with Customers choose products set to With checkboxes; a separate, older gift-picker exists only on bundles already built with it. See "Free gifts," below.

Volume discount bundles don't use this list at all — every option in a Volume discount is priced independently (see "Volume discount options," below).

Can I set a fixed price, or only a percentage?

Yes, but only when the number of items the bundle can end up containing is fixed. Percentage is always offered. Sale price and Amount off appear only once the item count is bounded — either nothing lets the shopper change it (Optional products and the Quantity selector both off), you've capped it with Maximum items allowed set to Limited, or you're pricing product-by-product with Applies to set to Individual product price and the Quantity selector off. The exact combinations that unlock each type are covered in "Choosing a discount type for your bundle" — the rule above is the short version.

One method removes the choice entirely: with the Free gift discount group on, there's no discount type to pick at all — the whole Applies to / Type / Value grid disappears, replaced by "Free" tick boxes on individual products.

Can I do fixed per-tier pricing (2 for $15, 3 for $22)?

It depends on what's being counted:

  • Counting units of one and the same product. Yes, with the Volume discount structure. Every option on a Volume discount can be priced with Percentage, Sale price or Amount off, regardless of how many products the bundle holds.

  • Letting the customer mix products and still hit the tier. Not possible in a single bundle. Volume discount only counts units of one product, and a Product groups bundle priced with Applies to set to Bundle subtotal amount and Type set to Sale price charges one flat total for any selection that meets the minimum, not a different price per quantity. Build two bundles instead, one per price point, each with its own minimum quantity.

  • A Tiered discount inside a Product bundle, not Volume discount. This is percentage-only by design — the shopper decides how many items go into the bundle, and only a percentage scales with a selection of unknown size. This has nothing to do with how many products are in the bundle; if you want fixed per-tier pricing, switch the structure to Volume discount rather than adding more products.

Can the cheapest item in the cart be free automatically?

No. Every free-gift mechanism needs you to name the products, variants or collections in advance. There is no rule that finds whichever item happens to be cheapest in a shopper's selection and discounts it.

Can I cap how many times one customer buys a bundle?

No. There is no per-customer limit, on purchases or on discounted units. Each checkout is evaluated on its own, with no memory of that customer's earlier orders.

Can I allow combining with some discount codes but not others?

No. The Combinations settings are set once per store, in Settings, and apply to every bundle equally. They work by discount class — Product, Order, Shipping, Subscription — not by individual code, so you cannot let one influencer's code stack while blocking another's.

Does the bundle discount change my free-shipping threshold?

The app's discount engine only ever issues product discounts; it never touches shipping. Whether your free-shipping threshold is measured before or after the bundle discount is Shopify's own behaviour, not something this app sets or changes.

Can a bundle discount raise the price?

No. Sale price can only lower the bundle's total. If the products a customer selects already cost less than the sale price you set, the bundle is added to the cart at the real product price instead — the app never charges more than the components would normally cost.

Volume discount options

Each option in a Volume discount can carry:

  • Option title. Auto-generated as Product Title x QTY, or a custom title you set.

  • Discount. Its own discount type and discount value.

  • Description. Free text, for example "MOST POPULAR OFFER."

  • Label. A savings pill shown only when the option discounts, supporting {{value}} (for example Save {{value}}), capped at 40 characters; an empty label falls back to default text.

  • Badge. A ribbon on the option's top edge, capped at 24 characters, translatable.

  • Free gift. One or more gift groups — see "Free gifts," below.

  • Exactly one option marked as the pre-selected default.

Options are constrained so the ladder always makes sense: Required items must exceed the previous option by at least one; once an option discounts, every option after it must also discount; and values must move in one direction across options — percentage and amount-off values increase, sale prices decrease. You can't build a Volume discount where a later, higher-quantity tier is worse than an earlier one.

Full field-by-field mechanics are in "Discount options, tiers and add-ons."

Free gifts

Three separate mechanisms, all optional for the customer to accept.

  • Free items in the bundle. Selected items get a 100% discount and a Free label. Offered by the Free gift discount method on Product bundles.

  • One gift from a set. You add gift products or collections and the customer picks one. Offered by the Free gift discount group when Optional products is off, or on with Customers choose products set to With checkboxes.

  • Gifts per volume option. One or more Free gift N groups, each optionally with a Pre-selected gift, labeled FREE GIFT (editable text). Offered by Add free gift on a Discount option.

Auto-add free gift to cart (an Advanced setting) controls whether the reward lands in the cart automatically:

  • A pre-selected gift with a single available variant is added silently.

  • A pre-selected gift with a variant choice, or any non-pre-selected group, opens the Choose free gift modal — which the customer can close without choosing.

  • A gift the customer removes is never re-added automatically; it stays reachable in the free gift bubble, where gifts can be added, removed or replaced when alternatives exist.

  • The gift set always follows the current volume option (the highest option whose quantity is met) — gifts never fall back to a lower option's gift set if the cart drops below the option that granted them.

What else shapes the price shown and charged

  • Display discount to customers from Compare-at price. The discount is still computed from the app price, but the crossed-out "was" price shown to the customer is the compare-at price instead.

  • Price display. Total price, Price per item, or Both total and per-item prices.

  • Per-product pricing detail. With Applies to set to Individual product price, you can price down to By variant (a box per variant) instead of a single box per product; and when a bundle has more than one product group, per-product rows are split under "By product group 1 / 2 / …" so it's clear which slot each price belongs to.

Can the app give each customer their own discount code?

No. Bundle discounts are automatic: they are calculated by Shopify at the cart and applied without anyone typing a code, so there is no code to make unique. The app cannot generate a per-customer code — for a free gift, a member reward, or anything else. If your campaign depends on each customer receiving their own code, that belongs in Shopify's own discount tools or a dedicated app, not here.

What does a Tiered discount's percentage apply to?

To each product's own price in the cart, not to a single pooled bundle total. Every product in the qualifying bundle is discounted by the same percentage off its individual price. With products at different prices, the more expensive ones give up more money, and the total taken off still equals that percentage of the combined subtotal.

Can a bundle discount combine with my other Shopify discounts?

Yes, within limits you control. Combinations discounts in the app's settings gives you four store-wide toggles — Product, Order, Shipping, Subscription — that each permit Shopify to consider combining the bundle discount with that class of Shopify's own discount, subject to Shopify's own combination rules. These toggles don't change any individual bundle's discount; they control what's allowed store-wide.

What isn't established anywhere in the app's documentation is how a bundle discount interacts with a third-party app's own automatic discount — specifically whether two automatic discounts compound, which one wins, or in what order they're applied. If you're running another app's automatic discount alongside a bundle and need to know the exact interaction, that's a case to bring to support directly rather than infer from the toggles above — mention which combination toggle you have on and the name of the other app's discount so support can check it for your store.

Shopify's own ceiling

Shopify limits how many active automatic discounts a store can run at once. Bundles beyond that ceiling simply stop discounting, and the app's bundle list shows a warning banner when this happens. See "Plans, billing and limits" for the other numeric caps that apply to bundles.

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