Discount Rule Basics
Our app offers select customers wholesale pricing through discount rules. These rules can be set to offer a percentage off the retail price of your products, or you can set a fixed wholesale price for items on your store. This guide explains how to set up non-volume based discount rules, meaning that these rules will not be based on the amount or quantity that your customer is adding to their cart.
Discount rules can apply to:
- Entire Store: Applies to every product in your store
- Collection: Applies to every product in a specific collection
- Product/Variants: Applies to a specific product - you can even set discount rules for specific product variants, allowing for different prices at the variant level!
When creating rules, you will also choose a customer tag; this tag will need to be added to any customer accounts that you wish to receive the discount, and they will automatically receive this pricing when they log in to their account on your store.
Wholesale vs. Retail Accounts
The main difference between a retail and wholesale customer is whether or not they have a customer tag on their account that corresponds to a tag set for a discount rule in Wholesale Gorilla.
Wholesale Gorilla recognizes the discount rule’s tag as a key to safely unlock the door to wholesale features to your customer, so all wholesale customers must have at least one active discount rule tag on their account in order to access any wholesale features and to see wholesale pricing. This means that you must set up at least one discount rule within our app in order for the app's other settings to "turn on".
On top of unlocking access to the rest of our features, discount rules allow your wholesale customers to see their prices instantly throughout your shop without any extra steps, codes or passwords. They can browse and place orders on your shop just as a retail customer would - but with their wholesale prices displayed in place of the retail pricing through the entire shopping process.
Discount rules also offer to lessen your workload as you only need to set up a rule once for it to remain in effect every time your customer wants to place an order.
You can even create discount rules on the same item, collection or site-wide pricing, thus allowing you to offer different prices to different customers. Since we use a tag system to lock discounts to your customer's accounts, you'll just want to be sure to use different tags on each different set of rules that you're setting up for your different customer's pricing.
Discount rules only work on an 'inclusive' level. This means that *all* items you discount under a rule will receive said discount, and items can not be "excluded" from the discount rule once it's set. You will want to be sure and only set up rules at levels that do not include items you do not wish to discount, as they will be discounted if they're covered under that rule's level.
Discount rules can easily be deleted once they have been created, and you can revoke a particular customer’s access to a discount by removing that tag from their account.
Note: We now offer highly requested .csv upload functions for non-volume discounts at out Pro Plan subscription level. If you'd like to learn more about this setting, please check out this guide.
Choosing a non-volume discount type & level
Wholesale Gorilla provides many different options for setting up discount rules. Below is an explanation of the two types of discounts that are non-volume based which are currently available, as well as more information on the four levels of non-volume discount rules.
Discount Rule Types
Percent Off
This will discount the retail cost by a certain percentage to create a new wholesale cost.
Retail Price: $10.00 => Percent Off: 20%
Wholesale Price = $8.00
Note: Changing the retail price of the product in Shopify via directly changing the listing's price will change the wholesale price for 'percent' style discount rules.
Set Price
This will set the product’s wholesale price to a specific amount.
Retail Price: $10.00 => Set Price Amount: $8.00
Wholesale Price = $8.00
Note: Changing the retail price of the product will only affect this discount if you set the retail price lower than the set cost of the discount (wholesale customers will always get the lowest price of the product, even if it’s the “retail” price). Otherwise, changing the retail price of your product will not change the wholesale price of the products that this rule is set for.
Discount Rule Levels
Entire Store
This discount rule will apply to every item in your store.
This discount is great for testing whether your discount rules are working or not. It is also perfect for stores that offer the same percent off or set price on every item they sell.
You can not exclude specific items from a discount rule once it's been set up. You will not want to use the 'Entire Store' level of discounting unless you fully intend to offer your Entire Store at that discount amount.
Tip: If you need to charge more for any item within your shop, you would need to delete this rule and make a new one (since the wholesale customer will always get the lowest price). If you need to price an item lower than the rest, you can simply add a new discount rule for this item and the wholesale customer will be given the lower price while everything else keeps this entire site based discount.
Collection
The discount rule will apply to every item in a specific collection.
This discount works well when you have collections set up with already like-priced items/items that will receive the same percent off or set price based on type. You can edit your collection within Shopify to change which items will or won’t receive this discount without having to make a new rule.
Please keep in mind that you will have to publish your collection in order for it to be discounted via a collection-level rule. Failing to publish the collection & make it active within your online store via Shopify's settings will result in that collection-level rule not turning on, thus your customers won't be given that discount even if they're logged into an account with that rule's tag on it.
Tip: You can make collections in Shopify for the sole purpose of organizing discounts. For example you can create a collection in Shopify called Wholesale-50 and set a discount rule in Wholesale Gorilla for that collection to be 50% off, and another called Wholesale-40 that is 40% off. You don’t have to link to these collection in your store navigation, but can use them just to organize wholesale prices -- just make sure you do publish the collection to your online store so that the discount can take effect.
Product
This rule will apply to a specific product, or set of products should you choose to select more than one while setting up the rule.
If a product has variants you will see a checkbox “Apply discount to all variants.” Uncheck this box and a list of variants will appear. From here you can set a fixed price or percent off for each individual variant.
Note: Any amount fields left blank will be ignored and no discount rule will be created for that variant.
Selecting Multiple Products
After selecting “Product” for a discount level you can choose multiple products in the modal box that appears on screen. This is great for entering prices in bulk, or setting prices for multiple products when a collection discount won’t work.
By default you will need to enter the price for each variant, but if you click “Apply to variants” next to a product you can set the price (or % off) for the product as a whole and it will apply to all of the product’s variants.
Any blank fields will be ignored and no discount will be set.
Create a wholesale discount
Below are the steps to creating a discount rule. If this is your first time creating a discount rule or you are testing whether your discount rules are still working, please follow the recommendations in italics.
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Open the Wholesale Gorilla app and click on the ‘Discounts’ tab. On the upper right of the page click ‘Create Discount’.
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Next you will pick the Discount Level. The discount level determines what the discount will be set upon; our app offers 4 different discount levels (see above in bold). We recommend testing your first discount rule on the ‘Entire Store’ level, as this will give you the quickest idea of whether the rule is working or not.
3. Next you will need to pick out a tag for the discount rule. This will be the tag that you apply to any customer accounts that you wish to attach this pricing to. In this example, we have chosen the tag ‘wholesale’. NOTE: The tags in Shopify are case-sensitive, so please be sure to mind the capitalization you choose here.
Wholesale (capital W) is not equal to wholesale (lowercase w)
4. Next you will pick the Discount Type - Percentage based or Set Price. We recommend testing your first discount rule on the ‘Set Price’ style of discount, as this will give you the quickest idea of whether the rule is working or not.
5. Your last step is to enter something into the Amount field, which will depend on which style of discount you have selected:
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If you selected Percent Off, enter a numeral for the percent you wish to deduct from the retail price
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If you selected Set Price, enter the exact wholesale price of the item
In the example below, we have entered ‘$8.88’ as the new set price for our entire store:
6. Once you have completed each step of the discount rule creation, click Save.
*PLEASE NOTE! Your discount will not take effect until the same tag set in the rule is applied to a customer’s account and that customer has logged in to their account.
You can check out our guide on customer account set up for more information on this process.
Here is what your discount rule would look like following our example.