👉  Shift from urgency-based discounts to volume-based incentives. Blanket 20% off sales train customers to wait for promotions and never buy at full price. Quantity discounts (“buy more, save more”) can be permanent offers because they don’t rely on deadline pressure—the incentive is always there to increase cart size. This psychology keeps margins healthier while still giving customers compelling value, and it works whether you’re doing $10K months or $1M months.

👉  Match your discount structure to how customers actually want to buy your products. If you sell low-cost items where people might buy 50 units (think pens, stickers, accessories), use bulk tiered pricing that rewards any quantity and lets them choose exactly how many. If you sell higher-ticket items where you’re nudging from one to three purchases (candles, skincare, apparel), volume bundles with fixed tiers work better. Don’t just copy what competitors do—think about the actual purchase behavior your products encourage.

👉  Use quantity discounts to offset rising customer acquisition costs. Google algorithm changes over the past two years have pushed CAC higher across the board. If your cost to acquire a customer jumped from $30 to $50, you need that first order to generate more revenue to stay profitable. Strategic quantity discounts that increase AOV by 30-40% while maintaining healthy margins let you absorb higher acquisition costs without sacrificing profitability. This matters whether you’re spending $500 or $50K monthly on ads.

👉  Don’t let Shopify’s 25-discount limit constrain your strategy. Many brands assume they must choose one discount approach and apply it uniformly because of platform limitations. Modern quantity discount apps combine unlimited discount rules into a single Shopify discount code, letting you run bulk tiered pricing on some products and volume bundles on others. You can segment strategies across different product categories, collections, or even markets without hitting technical constraints.

👉  Question whether your current discount strategy is right for your products or just familiar. Most Shopify brands use volume bundles because that’s what popular apps offer, while WooCommerce stores use bulk tiered pricing for the same reason—each ecosystem has its defaults. If you migrated platforms or are launching new product lines, don’t assume the discount structure you’ve always used is optimal. Ask yourself: would customers benefit from choosing their exact quantity, or do fixed tiers work better? Sometimes the answer is different for different product categories in the same store.

👉 For Q4 and beyond, think permanent strategy over promotional tactics. Black Friday Cyber Monday creates urgency that works regardless of your discount structure, but what happens in January when the promotional calendar goes quiet? Quantity-based discounting gives you a year-round strategy that doesn’t rely on artificial deadlines or conditioning customers to wait. Whether you’re early-stage testing product-market fit or enterprise-scale optimizing margins, building a sustainable discount framework now sets you up for profitable growth in 2026.

Katie Keith
Founder & CEO, Barn2

Katie Keith founded Barn2 in 2009, initially as a WordPress web design agency, before transitioning to building plugins in 2016. Now her company solves complex pricing and discount challenges for ecommerce brands—and the numbers are pretty impressive. Her plugins serve over 100,000 stores in the WooCommerce ecosystem, with her flagship WooCommerce Discount Manager offering six different discount types (soon to be seven). That gives her team this incredible bird’s-eye view into which discount strategies actually drive profitability versus which ones just kill margins.

What’s really valuable is the data advantage. Analyzing millions of transactions across tens of thousands of active stores reveals patterns that individual merchants rarely observe. Katie’s background spans both technical development and strategic business thinking, which is evident in how Barn2’s solutions strike a balance between sophisticated functionality and execution that makes sense for busy merchants.

When she started researching Shopify discount apps to expand beyond WooCommerce, she discovered something surprising: the discount strategies popular in each ecosystem were radically different, even though both platforms serve similar types of ecommerce businesses. Bulk tiered pricing dominated WooCommerce but was rare in Shopify. Volume bundles were everywhere in Shopify but virtually absent in WooCommerce. Nobody was really questioning why.

That cross-platform perspective gives Katie unique insight into why merchants often just copy what competitors on their platform are doing without ever asking whether that strategy actually fits their products. Barn2’s recent launch on Shopify brings both bulk tiered pricing and volume bundle approaches to the platform, letting brands choose—or combine—discount structures based on product characteristics and customer behavior rather than just platform defaults. The company’s Bundles and Bulk Discounts app solves technical headaches like Shopify’s 25-discount limit while maintaining the sophisticated discount logic they’ve refined over years of serving six-figure stores.

What makes Katie’s perspective so valuable isn’t just the technical execution—it’s her emphasis on strategic thinking over tool adoption. She consistently pushes merchants to question whether they’re using a particular discount structure because it’s right for their products or simply because it’s what everyone else does. That focus on thoughtful strategy over template-following has made Barn2’s solutions essential infrastructure for brands that want to increase profitability through smarter discounting rather than just racing to the bottom on promotional percentages.