Marketing Manager
In 2025, retail eCommerce sales are estimated to exceed $3.6 trillion, with approximately 2.8 billion people worldwide making at least one online purchase. Notably, 38% of these transactions involve a coupon code or discount. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a huge opportunity for Shopify merchants to scale orders through promotions.
However, the numbers below reveal fierce competition lying ahead:
This is why simply running a sale is no longer enough. You need a well-designed offer strategy that covers the entire buying journey, helping you convert traffic into high-value orders for long-term growth. In this post, I will break down the 4 winning offer types with a comprehensive guide on exactly how to execute them that I’ve learned from helping over 10,000 global stores during the last 11 years.
Interestingly, free gift with spending was pioneered by Estée Lauder in the 1940s. For many retail brands, this offer type has become a foundational promotion strategy, giving customers a free product or service when they qualify for a purchase condition.
Decades later, this idea still remains one of the most effective sales drivers. It leverages the perceived value of the gift to make the main product more compelling at both functional and emotional levels when customers are comparing similar options.
While its roots lie in beauty and cosmetics, free gift with spending is now widely used across fashion, electronics, home goods, and food & beverage. But in today’s crowded eCommerce landscape, where millions of stores fight for the same attention, the real challenge is knowing when and how to structure it so it truly drives sales.
Gift with spending is designed to drive AOV by anchoring the gift to a specific spending threshold. Through this approach, you psychologically motivate customers to add more to unlock the reward, which naturally stretches their cart.
Furthermore, this tactic shines brightest during emotional, gift-giving occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, or Brand Anniversaries, where the free item serves as a bonus present and adds significant emotional appeal to each transaction.
Over the past decade, working with eCommerce brands, the most common pitfall I’ve seen is reliance on guesswork. To increase AOV without sacrificing profits, a data-backed setup is essential built around three core pillars 👇
Merchants often set thresholds too low, which quietly hurts margins through shipping and fulfillment costs, or push them so high that customers disengage. The ideal trigger condition should be set at 15-20% above your current AOV. This percentage is high enough for a profitable margin but affordable enough to avoid frustration.
The key is balancing value and cost. Choose gifts that feel valuable to customers but cost very little for you to produce. You can add more emotional value to this gift by making it exclusive, limited-time, or unpurchasable. More importantly, make sure the gift is closely related to the main product or brand category. When the gift feels relevant, customers are more excited to complete the purchase.
Don’t make customers manually work to get their reward. The gift should be added to the cart automatically the moment they reach the spending threshold. If customers have to search for the gift or enter a discount code, many will drop off due to unexpected friction.
An invisible offer is a useless offer. Make yours impossible to miss and visible at every key touchpoint without disrupting the shopping experience. To maximize conversion rates, implement:
Focus on a benefit-driven message that clearly highlights the reward and the requirement, rather than just generically announcing a sale. More importantly, keep this message consistent across all marketing channels to build recognition. Finally, include soft urgency to act as a psychological nudge, motivating shoppers to complete their purchase immediately rather than delaying.
With 47.2% of Shopify stores actively engaging customers on Instagram, followed by 28.2% on Facebook and 12.2% on TikTok, one thing is clear: an omnichannel approach is no longer optional. In addition to social platforms, email remains a powerful channel for re-engaging existing customers.
As a result, a GWP campaign shouldn’t exist only on your website; it needs to be consistently reinforced across these high-engagement social channels to drive traffic back to your store.
To make sure no customer misses the offer, start with a sticky header bar on your online store to keep the promotion top of mind across every page. As customers browse, reinforce the offer with promo badges on collection or product pages. Finally, close the loop with a smart progress bar in the cart drawer, showing exactly how close shoppers are to unlocking the reward.
👉 Learn how to set up the Progress Bar with BOGOS
Take Elite-N-Titled, an Australian activewear brand, as a practical example. During its 2025 Christmas campaign, the brand consistently communicated a clear and benefit-driven message “Get snowflake pilates socks when you spend $149.99,” across its main channels.
Beyond just keeping the message consistent, there is a bigger lesson here. Elite-N-Titled proved that a campaign works best when you add a “holiday touch” to every part of it, not just the text. By choosing snowflake socks instead of a regular item, they made the gift feel special and relevant to Christmas.
👉 This simple step of matching the gift to the season made the offer much more attractive and helped them reach nearly $280K in sales with BOGOS in November.
Klower Pandor, a fragrance brand, achieved a staggering 13x sales increase in just one month by leveraging a strategic mix of gift with purchase and tiered spending thresholds.
Their approach was two-fold. First, they hooked buyers with exclusive merchandise featuring their ambassador, Shuhua from i-dle, a famous K-pop group.
Then, they elevated the strategy by implementing a tiered-offer tactic. Every threshold and reward was thoughtfully selected to maximize AOV:
1️⃣ Spend TWD 1,200: Get a perfume pendant
2️⃣ Spend TWD 1,800: Get a pendant + scented hand cream
3️⃣ Spend TWD 2,500: Get a pendant + hand cream + sleep spray
4️⃣ Spend TWD 4,000: Get everything above + a scented candle
This strategy worked because the thresholds were smartly designed. The TWD 1,200 tier required only small add-ons like hand cream that replenish quickly, bringing customers back sooner.
Alternatively, premium perfumes could also hit this threshold while maximizing profit. Higher tiers, meanwhile, were strategically designed for specific customer groups: loyal repeat buyers and high-spenders who are likely to stock up in single orders.
Klower Pandor took visibility one step further with BOGOS’s Today Offer feature – a storefront badge that gave every visitor instant access to the promotion details without disrupting the browsing experience.
This strategy fully utilized the psychology of gifting. By blending functional rewards (skincare products) with emotional incentives (fandom merch) and ensuring high visibility via the storefront badge, Klower Pandor created an ecosystem where every order felt like a win for the customer, and a profit boost for the brand.
Just as the “Happy Meal” revolutionized fast food by selling a complete meal rather than a single burger, product bundling has transformed eCommerce by shifting the focus from individual SKUs to a curated collection of items.
It is the strategy of grouping complementary products into a single package, often sold at a slight discount, to create an irresistible value proposition. This strategy is now common across cosmetics, supplements, technology, and gift-focused stores because it taps into two motivators:
While customers get everything they need in one decision, merchants benefit from higher AOV. However, bundling isn’t about combining products at random. The challenge lies in creating bundles that feel logical to the customer while remaining profitable for your bottom line.
Product bundling serves as an AOV engine, designed to multiply the value of a single transaction by encouraging customers to purchase complete solutions. Beyond revenue, this tactic is also leveraged to clear inventory by grouping high-demand products to drive clicks with slower-moving stock.
While bundles work effectively as an “always-on” strategy year-round, they become indispensable during seasonal gifting periods, where pre-curated sets solve the “what to gift” dilemma for shoppers.
💡 Pro tip: If you want to unlock even higher engagement, consider elevating this offer type with a Build Your Own Bundle option, giving customers the flexibility to make their bundle for a more personalized buying experience.
The most dangerous trap in bundling is hurting your profit margin with random discounts. A sustainable bundle strategy must be mathematically sound before it is visually appealing.
To maximize AOV while staying profitable, follow these steps:
Your pairing logic must be obvious. Don’t force random items together; instead:
Do not discount blindly. Your pricing strategy must be dictated by your margin structure.
💡 Pro tip: Stuck on what to bundle? Sidekick, Shopify’s AI, can help. Just ask it to find products customers often purchase together, and you’ll have a data-backed bundle ready in minutes.
Even the best bundle will fail if customers don’t realize the savings or the convenience it offers. That’s why you should focus on educating the customer and visualizing the value.
Don’t just list what’s in the bundle, sell the why. Customers buy bundles for three reasons: to save money, save time, or get better results. Your messaging should tap into one of these motivations directly:
When customers see their motivation reflected in your message, the bundle stops feeling like a sales pitch and starts feeling like a smart decision.
For smaller stores, relying solely on owned channels to promote bundles often feels repetitive and yields limited results due to low organic reach. To break through the noise, you must pivot from talking about yourself to leveraging social proof.
Start by partnering with KOLs to unbox and demonstrate the synergy of the “whole set,” then arm them with exclusive and time-sensitive discount codes to create immediate urgency.
Additionally, for visual industries like Beauty, Fashion, and Home Goods, User-Generated Content (UGC) is a cost-effective powerhouse. Formats like unboxing videos, before-and-after reveals, or “get ready with me” clips. These formats feel genuine, build trust faster than polished ads, and drive traffic that’s ready to buy.
Make your bundle offer impossible to ignore by integrating it throughout the browsing experience. Start by adding a widget with a title like “Buy more to complete a set” on your product pages, so shoppers see the bundle while viewing individual items.
Next, create a dedicated page for the bundle, use a benefit-driven title, and feature it prominently in your website menu. This is particularly effective for Beauty or Supplement brands, where customers often need to review product ingredients or details before purchasing.
Finally, showcase your best bundles on the homepage banner and link directly to the bundle page, ensuring customers can easily access the deal they just saw without having to search.
RC Outfitters increased their sales by 50% simply by making it easier for beginners to buy the right gear.
They noticed that customers rarely buy just a tent, so they used BOGOS to create a bundle that included a tent, ground mat, and a floor liner with a 15% discount. To make the deal even better, they displayed a Free Shipping progress bar right next to the offer.
This showed customers that buying the bundle was the smartest move: they got the complete kit, the 15% discount, and free shipping all at the same time. By putting this entire deal on one screen, customers didn’t have to search around for separate items, making it an easy choice to buy the full set.
👉 Want to dive deeper into their strategy? Read the full RC Outfitters case study here to uncover the exact steps they took to achieve this growth.
Volume discount is a sales strategy where customers receive discounts based on the number of products they purchase. It is broader than quantity discount, which is based on the number of units or total cart value.
This strategy is particularly effective for industries with high consumption rates like food & beverage, health & wellness, or fragrance and personal care because it taps into two primal drivers:
Customers feel like “smart shoppers” by getting a better deal when purchasing in bulk, while merchants can clear inventory faster and increase sales. However, the challenge is not just discounting; it’s calculating the tiers so that selling more items at a lower price still boosts overall profits.
Volume discounts are designed to shift customer behavior from single-unit purchasing to bulk buying. Beyond simply increasing AOV, this tactic is the most powerful tool for inventory clearance.
So, it becomes indispensable during high-volume events like End-of-season clearance, Back-to-school, or Mega Sale Days (like Black Friday, double day). However, volume discounts can also be run as an always-on promotion strategy throughout the year and still perform effectively.
While the immediate goal of a Volume Discount is to drive a bigger sale, it serves a powerful second purpose: ensuring your product actually works for the customer. This is vital for reducing churn and boosting retention, especially in industries like Beauty and Supplements, where results take time.
Volume discounts create a double win: you boost AOV while giving customers enough product to see real results. Here’s how to structure this effectively in 3 steps 👇
Not every product is suitable for bulk offers. Your choice depends on your business goal:
Don’t just pick random numbers. Think of your quantity levels as a way to target three different types of shoppers:
This lets you offer a great deal to attract customers while making sure you never lose too much money on a single order.
Customer behavior has shifted significantly due to the rise of social media and AI, but one thing remains constant: the thrill of a good deal. According to Retail Times, 86% of consumers experience a “dopamine rush” when they find a bargain.
To tap into this, your Volume Discount campaign must be visible from your storefront to your marketing channels to turn every visitor into a profitable order.
Your messaging should straightforwardly highlight how much customers save after purchasing your volume discount offers. Make this offer more irresistible by adding a soft urgency, like a limited time, low stock, or make it a flash sale.
Your messaging should clearly show how much a customer “wins” by buying more. The trick? Show them how much cheaper each item gets when they buy more.
For example, if one shirt costs $40 but three shirts cost $90, highlight that each shirt drops to just $30. This shifts their thinking from “I’m spending more” to “I’m paying less per item,” and that’s a win they can brag about.
Then add scarcity tactics, which tap into FOMO with phrases like “Limited time only,” “Only 12 left,” or “Flash sale ends tonight.” Did you know? Scarcity tactics still drive 45% of shoppers to make a purchase, and 50% of marketing campaigns using these tactics see higher conversion rates, according to Amra & Elma, a leading digital agency in New York.
Volume discounts are usually high-impact events designed to drive massive GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) in a short time. So, they need to be visible everywhere to maximize potential sales.
RadiantXI is a US-based beauty brand specializing in premium anti-aging solutions. By focusing on a specific niche – skin rejuvenation, they have mastered the art of turning a single-product purchase into an increased order.
In the anti-aging niche, using a single bottle of serum rarely comes to quick results; it requires a long-term commitment. Thats why RadiantXI suggests a “Volume Discount Save” offer within the product page with discounts from 20 to 30%. This is deep enough to stop a customer from scrolling but still maintains a healthy profit margin.
To maximize the value of every visit, RadiantXI also features the “Better Results, Better Value” bundle, encouraging shoppers to upgrade from a single serum to a complete rejuvenation set.
By strategically pairing three serums with an LED Facial & Neck Sculptor, they provide a premium alternative that supports their volume discounts rather than competing with them. This approach offers customers more ways to shop while significantly increasing AOV.
👉 Inspired by RadiantXI’s smart strategy? Build your own winning volume discounts with BOGOS today!
Frequently bought together offer is a strategic suggestion of related or complementary products that enhance the value of the primary item in the cart. While this promotion approach is applicable across all industries, it works exceptionally well for categories where one item “needs” another to function better, look better, or complete a routine, such as Electronics & Accessories, Beauty & Cosmetics, or Home Goods.
Unlike volume discounts, which work best during high-impact sales events, this typical upsell offer can run year-round. There’s no need to wait for a seasonal push. As long as you’ve set a sustainable discount and have the stock to support it, upselling quietly boosts your AOV in the background, month after month.
An effective frequently bought together offer is a fine balance between offering an attractive deal and maintaining a healthy bottom line. Since you have already paid the marketing cost to get the customer to the cart, the upsell is your chance to maximize profit.
Follow these 3 steps to unlock its full potential:
Any upsell widget should never appear randomly. Instead, use clear logic to ensure the offer shows up at the right moment when customers are most likely to accept it. You can choose one of the following methods:
Relevance is everything. The most effective upsell products are those that naturally complement the main purchase and feel useful rather than forced. A helpful tip is to follow the 25% rule: the price of an upsell shouldn’t be more than 25% more than the product they are already looking at or buying.
When add‑ons are significantly more expensive than the main product, customers often take longer to decide, which may result in purchase delays or buying the main product only.
Your upsell discount should be compelling enough to trigger an impulse purchase, but still protect your margins.
Getting the offer right is only half the battle. Where and how you present it determines whether customers actually convert.
Key Message
Lead with the outcome, not only the discount. Instead of “Buy these two together for 10% OFF,” try “Complete your routine for maximum rejuvenation and save 10%.” The first sounds like a sales pitch. The second sounds like helpful advice.
Some customers need a second chance. Send a follow-up email 24 hours after purchase, suggesting the complementary item they skipped. Sweeten it with a limited-time “completion discount” to create urgency.
Don’t scatter your offers randomly. Match each placement to the customer’s mindset at that moment:
Here is how Wholebubs, an Australian premium baby retailer, put this into practice. They anchored their frequently bought together strategy on their high-traffic stroller by pairing it with a car capsule and car capsule adaptors.
This was a solution to a real pain point: moving a sleeping baby without waking them. Furthermore, with a 5% discount, they positioned the offer as a necessary lifestyle upgrade rather than an extra cost, effectively turning a single-product purchase into a high-value transaction.
Another great example of an upsell strategy comes from Bouyiee, a Malaysian skincare brand, . They don’t just show upsell offers in the cart drawer – they pair it with a progress bar that shows how close customers are to free shipping.
So when a shopper adds a product, they instantly see the notice “Add [value_remain] for free shipping” alongside matching suggestions. It turns the cart drawer into the hardest-working touchpoint in the entire buying journey.
After breaking down these four offer types, one pattern stands out: The best promotions don’t just attract clicks. They’re carefully designed journeys that reward customers at the right moments.
Here’s how to remember each strategy and when to use it:
1️⃣ Free Gift with Spending
2️⃣ Product Bundles
3️⃣ Volume Discounts
4️⃣ Frequently Bought Together
Running promotions isn’t hard. Running profitable promotions that actually grow your business, that’s the real challenge. The four offer types above aren’t just tactics. They’re strategic tools, each designed for a specific goal. But picking the right offer type is only half the battle. The real solution is making customers say yes without sacrificing the profits that keep your business growing.
We see this versatility in action with real-world examples from brands like Klower Pandor, RC Outfitters, RadiantXI, and Wholebubs. Across categories from Fragrance and Beauty to Outdoor Gear and Baby Products, brands effectively aligned offer types with their unique customer tastes and margin structures, achieving long-term outcomes.
Ready to put these strategies to work? Start with our free plan to test what works for your store. When you’re ready to scale, unlock advanced features with a 7-day free trial.
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