Offering quantity discounts

Currently, the standard Recharge app does not work with third-party quantity break apps such as Quantity Breaks or Volume & Tiered Discounts. Many quantity-break apps create duplicate variants to reflect different quantity prices. This can interfere with the Recharge variants required to create subscription orders.

This guide provides alternative methods for quantity-break apps if you would like to offer discounted pricing to customers who purchase multiple products.

Method 1 - Offer products in a bundle

By creating a series of bundles priced differently, you can incentivize customers to buy in quantity groups at a discounted price compared to the standalone products. Bundles enable merchants on Scale, Plus, or Custom pricing plans to build preset bundles to specify the products included or customizable bundles where customers select from a variety of product options to build their collection. 

Preset bundle

A preset bundle allows you to preselect the items for the discount. The single bundle product is added to the checkout and the customer receives the collection of preselected items included in the bundle at the bundle price. 

Customizable bundle

With customizable bundles you select the products that can be added and set the bundle price at the amount you would like to charge for that group of products. The customer can then select their item options and receive those items at a one bundle price. 

Method 2 - Offer quantity discounts as different products

In this example, you would build out three products as 4-item, 6-item, and 8-item boxes on your ecommerce platform. Then implement AJAX to add items to the cart, or use line-item properties to store selected items in the product details. Each product would be priced to reflect the total cost based on the discount you want to offer.

Method 3 - Offer quantity discounts as variants

You can leverage product variants to offer quantity discounts. By creating variants that reflect the number of items, you can price the variants in your ecommerce platform to reflect the total cost based on the discount you want to offer.

Method 4 - Offer quantity discounts using Product Subscription Plans and Bundles

If you use Product Subscription Plans, you can use a bundle product with multiple variants in Shopify to offer quantity discounts.

1. Create a bundle product in Shopify with multiple variants to represent the desired quantities. For example, a 4-pack, 8-pack, and 12-pack variant. 
2. Create Product Subscription Plans with the same frequency but different discount percentages for the parent bundle product.
3. Go to Manage variant plans and match each Subscription plan with one of the variants. For example, match the 20% discount plan to the 4-pack variant, and match the 30% discount plan to the 8-pack variant.

The result is specific subscribe-and-save discounts based on the bundle quantity.

Method 5 - Tiered discounts

Tiered discounts is a Recharge feature that allows you to set up dynamic discounts that increase based on the quantity of items in the cart using the Dynamic bundles feature. See our guide for more details on how to set up Tiered discounts. 

Method 6 - Quantity Upsells

Quantity Upsells is an Early Adopter feature that allows you to create flexible, incentive-based offers by offering customers larger discounts the more they buy. See Quantity Upsells for more information.