Rewards bar and discounts

What the rewards bar is

The rewards bar sits at the top of your cart drawer. It shows a shopper how close they are to the next reward, and fills up as they add items.

You can set up to four tiers. Each tier has an amount that unlocks it and a reward: free shipping, a percent off the order, or a fixed amount off the order.

The important part is the second half. A bar that fills up while checkout still charges full price is worse than no bar at all. So this screen asks you who applies the discount, and it refuses to publish a cart that promises something checkout would not honour.

Before you start

• Your cart needs the Rewards bar module. Most templates add it for you; the Minimal template does not.
• To add it, open the cart in Cart builder and use the Add a module picker. See Cart builder.
• The words shoppers read in the bar come from the Shopper copy screen, not from here. This screen sets the amounts and the rewards.

Set up your tiers

1. Go to Carts and click your cart's name to open Cart builder.
2. Under See it and style it, click Rewards bar.
3. Under Who applies the discount?, pick Smart Cart creates it unless you have already built the discount yourself in Shopify.
4. Under What counts toward a tier, set Measure by to Cart total, before discounts or Number of items.
5. In Tiers, fill in Unlocks at, choose a Reward, and add a Worth if the reward is a percent or an amount. Leave rows you don't need blank.
6. In What doesn't count, tick anything that should not count toward a tier. Gift cards are excluded by default.
7. Click Save. It sits at the bottom of the What doesn't count section and saves the whole screen.
8. Click Open preview under See it to watch the tiers unlock against a cart you choose.
9. Go back to the cart and use Review and publish. Nothing on this screen reaches a shopper until you publish. See Publishing.

Settings on this screen

The fields on each tier

Who applies the discount

Smart Cart creates it

This is the normal choice. When you publish, Smart Cart creates an automatic discount in your Shopify admin that pays out your tiers at checkout.

I've already set this up in Shopify

Choose this when the discount already exists in your own Shopify discounts. Smart Cart then reports rather than discounts: the bar shows shoppers how close they are, and Shopify applies the reward. The screen shows a banner reminding you of this.

What publishing creates in Shopify

The What this creates in Shopify section on the screen tells you exactly what will happen. If none of your tiers gives a discount we apply, it says so plainly and nothing is created.

Otherwise, publishing creates one automatic discount called Sofcy Cart Rewards. You'll find it in Shopify admin → Discounts, shown as an automatic discount managed by this app. It is one discount however many tiers you set, so it uses one slot rather than four.

If you later remove every tier that pays out and publish again, Smart Cart deletes that discount rather than leaving a dead row in your discount list.

Shopify's limit of 25

Shopify allows 25 active automatic discounts on a store at once. The screen shows how many your store is using, and how many of those were created by apps. If it can't check, it says so rather than showing a zero.

If your store is already at 25, publishing a cart that needs a new discount is blocked. Pause or remove an automatic discount in Shopify admin → Discounts, then publish again.

What doesn't count toward a tier

Exclusions matter more than they look. Without them a shopper buys a £200 gift card, unlocks free shipping on a £12 order, and you lose money on every one. Excluded lines don't count toward any tier, in the bar and at checkout.

Collections are deliberately not offered. Shopify doesn't tell the cart which collections an item is in, so the bar would have to guess and could disagree with your checkout. Use the product type instead, or list the products.

Prices and currencies

You set thresholds in your store's currency. For a shopper browsing in another currency, both the bar and the checkout convert your threshold using the same rate, so the two always agree. Item counts are never converted — three items is three items in every currency.

Totals are measured before any discount code, so applying a code never pushes a shopper backwards down the bar.

When saving or publishing is refused

Some things are refused at save time, with the reason listed at the top of the screen:

• A percent reward above 100%.
• A percent or amount reward with no Worth filled in.
• Two tiers that unlock at the same amount — the bar can only point at one of them.
• More than 100 excluded product IDs.

Publishing is refused separately, and the screen shows a red banner reading "This cart would promise something checkout won't honour" as soon as that is true, so you meet it here rather than at the publish button.

Discount rules size

Everything Smart Cart sends to the checkout — your tiers, your exclusions, your free gift and offers — has to fit inside a 10,000 byte limit set by Shopify. A Discount rules size section appears once you pass about 80% of it, and publishing is blocked above the limit.

This one is worth taking seriously. Over the limit, Shopify doesn't throw an error: it simply stops sending your rules, so nobody gets a discount, the bar keeps filling, and nothing anywhere says so. Long lists of product IDs are what fill this up. Swapping them for a product type is usually the quickest fix.

Limitations

• Four tiers maximum. There is no way to add a fifth.
• No collection exclusions. Use product types, vendors or product IDs, for the reason given above.
• Up to 100 excluded product IDs. Longer lists cost more than Shopify's discount engine can spend on a single checkout.
• One discount for the whole store. Smart Cart keeps a single Sofcy Cart Rewards discount per store, so if you publish reward tiers on more than one cart, the most recent publish is the one checkout uses.
• Uninstalling doesn't clean the discount up. Smart Cart removes it when you unpublish your paying tiers, but at uninstall the app has no access left to delete anything. Check Shopify admin → Discounts and remove Sofcy Cart Rewards yourself if it is still there.
• No reward performance figures on this screen. It configures the bar; it doesn't report on it.
• Sending cart events to Google Analytics 4 or Meta is not available yet. That forwarding does not currently work and is not sold, so you can't measure rewards in those tools through Smart Cart.