How to Exclude Certain Products from Discounts on Shopify

Last Updated on April 4, 2024 by Dan S
Originally Published April 12, 2021.

Read this guide to find out how to exclude certain products from Shopify Discounts. Being an ecommerce merchant, announcing sales promotions and discounts are a great way to keep existing customers engaged with your brand as well as capturing new customers.

This is important throughout the year, especially during Black Friday and the BFCM weekend.

Table of Contents

Discounts and promotions in Shopify

Out of the box, the discounts in Shopify are extremely flexible. They are broken in to 2 types:

Discount Codes
Automatic Discounts

Discount Codes

Discount codes allow you to create specific codes for collections and products, site wide discounts, a single product discount, buy X get Y, percentage, set fee discount and more.

Automatic Codes

Automatic discounts follow a similar setup and configuration but require no code to be input by the customer. As of writing, you can only have 1 automatic discount code active per store.

Can you exclude particular products?

Currently no, you can not exclude certain products. You can create discounts for specific products but you can’t enable say a site wide discount and then exclude a particular set of products for example. Don’t fear though, we have some solutions.

Based on the collection approach, you can apply discount codes to specific products and therefore not on others.

There are numerous ways to exclude products from the discounts in Shopify. The key filter options with discounts you have are the following:

All Products
Specific Collections
Specific Products

By using the above-mentioned options, you can exclude the products. The Specific Collections filter is more useful as collections are easy to deal with.

Excluding Using Collections

If you are aware of the title of the product(s) to exclude, you can make a collection that includes all products except those that contain a specific word in their title.

To do this:

Step 1) Go to Shopify Admin > Products then navigate to Collections.

Step 2) Create an Automated Collection. Use the filters to create a collection that will exclude the products you don’t want to include in the promotion.

The collection may take a short period of time update. After it’s done, all products in-store except the ones you excluded, will be shown in the collection.

Using the “is not equal to” or “does not contain” is very helpful to create collections that exclude specific products. Besides Product Title, other conditions can also be used to exclude products:

Product Type
Product Vendor
Product Price
Product Tag
Compare at price
Weight
Inventory Stock
Variant’s Title

Now you can utilise these newly created collections to manage your discounting requirements.

Discount a Specific Collection

Go to your created discount code or automated discount where you need to exclude products. If you haven’t set one up yet, create a new discount code from the Shopify Admin.

Ensure that this discount code or an automated discount just applies to specific collections and choose the collection you created from the earlier step.

Save the discount and you’re done.

When running your sale campaign now, your chosen products would automatically be excluded from a collection. The “Not-on-sale “collection you created before cannot be further discounted with Discount Codes.

After the sale ends, the tag “not-on-sale” will be automatically added to the collection again and Discount Codes will be applied to those products.

How to exclude discount codes on sale items in Shopify

Are you planning to have a Black Friday or Christmas sale on your Shopify store but what if you already offer discount codes to your customers? Double the markdown could be problematic, putting you at a loss.

Sure enough, you’d want to set a condition disallowing the customers from using their discount code on the sale items.

So, how can you exclude discount codes from being applied to sale items in your Shopify store?

Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t have this feature yet but there is a workaround.

Excluding discount codes from sale items

Since Shopify doesn’t let you do this directly, you have to separate sale items by creating a new Product Type. The method is only feasible if you don’t use the product type field to filter the collection.

Make a new collection, named ‘Non-Sale Items’
In the condition, select’ Product Type’ and ‘not equal to.’ Lastly, select ‘Sale Item’ in the condition
Now, remove this collection of products from the sales channel
When you’re offering a sale on a product, assign it as ‘Sale Item’
For the coupon, choose ‘Non-Sale Items’ as the collection

Doing so will limit the customers from using their discount codes on items that are already on sale. When you don’t want the products to be on sale anymore, you can remove the Sale Item tag from them.