Prefill a Shopify discount with the Fetch API

Shopify has a method for prefilling discounts at checkout. It’s designed to allow a merchant to share a link for marketing purposes so that visitors using the link will conveniently have the discount applied at checkout rather than having to remember the spelling of the code, or get frustrated with typos. The discount link takes the format <SITE URL>/discount/<DISCOUNT CODE>.

Visiting that link will store a discount code in a browser Cookie (to be read later at the checkout), and then redirects the visitor to the homepage¹ so that the whole process feels seamless.

Why not use an Automatic Discount? #

Shopify also supports Automatic Discounts that don’t rely on having a specific code applied at checkout. Unfortunately, there are some limitations to Automatic Discounts, so certain discounts can only be achieved when requiring a code.

Just use fetch #

There are also some cases where traffic may already be inbound to a specific page and there’s no opportunity to use the /discount/ link directly. For that case (and the one above) I set up a simple section that a client can add to any page to make a ‘visit’ invisibly with a fetch request and have the discount prefilled. I chose not to directly manipulate or create the Cookie myself as that would involve a lot more code and as the format of the Cookie is not documented, it’s also more likely to change without any notice and silently break. So this simple one-liner does the job and should be well supported.

Here’s the code with section settings that allow it to be added to your OS2 templates.

{%- if section.settings.discount_code != blank -%}
<script>fetch('/discount/{{ section.settings.discount_code }}');</script>
{%- endif -%}

{% schema %}
{
  "name": "Prefill discount",
  "class": "shopify-section--prefill-discount",
  "tag": "section",
  "settings": [
    {
      "type": "text",
      "id": "discount_code",
      "label": "Discount code"
    }
  ],
  "presets": [
    {
      "name": "Prefill discount"
    }
  ]
}
{% endschema %}

Caveats #

Shopify will only store and apply one prefilled discount at checkout, so keep in mind that if a visitor already has another discount stored in a Cookie, that will then be overridden if they visit a page with the section prefilling the discount. So be careful not to leave expired or unwanted versions of these sections live on the site as you may unintentionally overwrite another code!