How to Exclude Certain Products from Discounts on Shopify

To exclude specific products from discounts on Shopify, you have a few clean ways to do it-some native, some clever. No shady hacks needed. Here’s what actually works:

Option 1: Use Automatic Discount Conditions

If you’re using an automatic discount:

Steps:

1. Go to Discounts > Create discount > Automatic

2. Under “Customer buys”, select:

   • Specific collections or specific products

3. Only include the items you want to discount
   Anything not selected = excluded

Use this when you want tight control over which items qualify.

Option 2: Discount Code with Conditions

If you’re using a discount code:

1. Go to Discounts > Create discount > Discount code

2. Under “Applies to”, choose:

   • Specific collections, specific products, or exclude items by tags

3. Apply code only to eligible items.

Pro tip from shopthemedetector.com:
Use a tag like no-discount, then avoid any product with that tag in your discount logic. Easy to scale.

Option 3: Use Shopify Scripts (Shopify Plus Only)

If you’re on Shopify Plus, you can write Shopify Scripts to exclude products based on:

• Price

• Tags

• Collections

• Inventory

Example: skip all products tagged premium.

Option 4: Prevent Double Discounts

If you’re running Compare at Price + discount codes, remember:

Shopify will apply both unless the code explicitly excludes products. Always test before launch.

Does Shopify have this Feature?

When it comes to boosting sales on your Shopify store, nothing works better than some clever marketing (social media or email marketing) and a great discount. There are lots of times when you might want to offer some discounts too, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday being some of the most popular times when brands offer discounts online for products. However, not every product should have a discount applied against it. One category to consider excluding from discounts are discontinued or archived products that you are trying to clear out of inventory. Applying a discount to these may lead to increased sales, but could also diminish perceived value if customers realize they are old or outdated models. Another scenario where you may want to restrict discounts is for age-restricted products or content. For example, if you sell vaporizers or other age-gated items, applying a storewide discount could enable underage purchases, violating laws and regulations. The same applies to mature content like videos or literature - discounting these blindly may put inappropriate material in the wrong hands. Consider small products or services (like gift wrapping) where you have set costs that have low margins. Sometimes these are known as impulse products, where customers add them into the cart at the last minute because you show them. Impulse products are usually low-ticket items with low profit margins, but they help to make orders more profitable altogether. If you’ve got a sale of 15% off everything, but the impulse products are 10% profit margin, then you might get a loss on the order. Therefore, you want to exclude these type of items from your discounts. Another time when you might want to restrict discounts is if there is a new product out. For instance, if you sell shoes and the latest Nike trainers have come out, you might want to offer a discount on all the other products, but not the new Nike trainers where you can get a premium price for them. So, how do you make sure that when you offer a discount code for sales, that certain products do not have the discount applied against them? Here is the solution.
No, while Shopify offers discount code functionality and other great advanced features to help you grow your business, they don’t have any specific feature that will help you exclude products from your discount codes.

However, you can use the collection approach to apply discount codes to specific products and then other collections can be excluded from the discounts.

Excluding Products from Discounts using Collection Method

These are the steps that you need to create a discount on your website that allows you to exclude other products from the deal.

Step 1 - Log In

The first step is to log into your website using your credentials.

Step 2 - Products

If you know the product title of the products that you want to exclude from your discount, then you can make a collection quickly without needing to look up the names/details. To do this, go to the ‘Products’ tab from the left-hand menu.

Step 3 - Collections

Go to the Collections in the Shopify Admin.

Step 4 - Create Automated Collections

Now you need to create an automated collection where you enter in filters that prevent the products you don’t want to be discounted from entering the collection. This can include using filters like ‘is not equal to’ to filter out specific products.

Or you could use this with other conditions to limit discounts to products from certain vendors, over a certain price, product tag and so on.

For example, you could use a tag where a product that has recently been published is labeled as new. Then your filter could equal ‘product tag is not equal to ‘new’’.

Step 5 - Create Discount

Now you can create a discount as you would otherwise by offering the discount against that new collection that you’ve built.