Targeting Products

Where Targeting Lives#

Every discount in xDiscount applies to a list of products you choose. There is no “all products” switch and no collection picker, and a discount that targets nothing cannot be saved.

Above the product list is a summary line, and each product carries its own line underneath it.

If you try to save with nothing selected, the section shows “Choose at least one product for this discount to apply to.”, the page shows the banner This discount can’t be saved yet, a toast reads “Fix the highlighted fields before saving.”, and nothing is written.

Choosing Products#

Included products is a working list, not a read-only summary. Everything on it can be changed in place.

Whole Products vs Specific Variants#

This is the single most important targeting decision, and the app infers it from how you used the list rather than asking you.

An empty variant list means every variant, including variants you add in Shopify tomorrow.

Unticking every variant is refused, with a sentence on that product rather than a silent rewrite:

Keep at least one variant, or remove the product from this discount.

Why whole-product targeting is worth preferring:

• New variants are covered automatically. Add a new size next month and a whole-product target picks it up. A list of specific variants never will, and the new one is silently left out.
• It costs almost nothing against the size limit. A whole-product target stores no variant list at all. See Size Limits below.
• It is what a merchant usually means. “20% off these five products” is nearly always every variant of those five.

Narrow to variants when the offer genuinely differs by variant, so clearing one colour, discounting the large size only, or running a promotion on a single SKU.

Excluding a variant is done by not selecting it. There is no exclusion picker. Narrow the product to the variants you want discounted, and everything you left unticked is untouched.

On the storefront, the offer card follows the variant the shopper selects. An offer narrowed to other variants is dimmed and flagged Not available for the selected variant the moment they pick one you left out, and comes back when they pick one you included — so the card never advertises a discount checkout will not give.

Skipping Out-of-Stock Variants#

In the Discount configuration section there is a checkbox, Skip products that are out of stock, with the note “Checked at save time. Variants with no stock won’t be discounted.” It is off by default.

Variants with no stock stop being discounted. Every other variant on the product carries on as normal. The setting is per discount, so two discounts on the same product can disagree, and only the one with the box ticked skips anything.

This is the same mechanism as the Inventory condition, set to the special case “at least 1 in stock”. Stock is read at the same moments, from the same source, and the same rule about untracked variants applies.

The honest limits of this feature:

Size Limits, When a Discount Targets Too Much#

Shopify gives every product a fixed budget for the configuration a discount can read at checkout: 10,000 bytes. xDiscount stores one configuration per product, holding every live discount that targets that product, so the variants each one is narrowed to, the conditions, and any gift products. Drafts and archived discounts are left out of it entirely and cost nothing.

Above 10,000 bytes Shopify still stores the configuration, but checkout stops being able to read it, so the discount would never apply, with no error shown anywhere. xDiscount refuses to let that happen quietly. It measures the configuration before writing anything to Shopify, and if it is over the limit it declines the write rather than trimming your settings.

What you see when this happens:

• Your discount still saves, so you never lose your work.
• On the Discounts list, its Sync column shows a warning badge reading TOO_LARGE.
• On Home, a red banner appears, Some discounts aren’t reaching your store, with a Review them button that opens the Discounts list filtered to exactly those discounts.
• You can find them yourself at any time: Discounts → the Sync filter → Too large.

The budget is per product, not per discount. Targeting 500 different products is fine, because each one gets its own 10,000 bytes. What consumes the budget is listing individual variants of one product, plus conditions, plus Buy X get Y gift products. As a rule of thumb, a list of around 100 variants costs about 4.3 KB, close to half the budget for a single product.

How to get a too-large discount back under the limit:

Saving again is also how you retry anything showing FAILED, because every save re-pushes the configuration to Shopify.

When Several Discounts Target the Same Product#

A product can carry as many discounts as you like, and xDiscount keeps them all in one configuration. At checkout, only one product discount applies per item, the one with the lowest Priority number among those that match. Archiving or deleting one discount rewrites that product’s configuration with the survivors, so the others keep working untouched.

One case is worth knowing about in advance. If two discounts on the same product both use an Inventory condition with different ranges, both obey the combination of the two, so the looser one skips more variants than it asked for. That keeps the product’s configuration inside the 10,000-byte limit, and it errs towards discounting less rather than more.

Quick Reference#