How to set up quantity price breaks in Shopify
Quantity-based pricing can boost your store's revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and move stock quicker. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up quantity price breaks in Shopify with the default features and with the help of a simple-to-use app.
Do you want to add quantity price breaks to your Shopify store? This type of quantity discount is popular amongst merchants looking to boost sales without increasing marketing spend.
In this post, I'll walk you through the steps to add quantity breaks in Shopify using its inbuilt features and with the help of Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts, a simple-to-use and flexible app.
I'll also share actionable advice on setting up quantity price breaks effectively so you can maximize profits.
Ready? Let's begin with a brief overview of how the quantity price break sales strategy works.
Apps used in this tutorial:
- Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts: A simple-to-use app that makes quantity price breaks profitable and easy to manage. Offer various types of high-converting discounts, including Buy X Get Y, combo deals, bundle offers, and of course, quantity price breaks.
What are Shopify quantity price breaks?
In Shopify, a quantity price break is a sales strategy where you offer discounted prices when customers buy more of an item. Instead of charging the same price per item regardless of the number of items ordered, you lower the per-unit product price when customers purchase in bulk.
There are two types of quantity price breaks:
- Tiered pricing (volume pricing per tier). Here, the per-unit price changes depending on how many units the customer buys, but only units in that tier get the discounted rate. For example, a store that sells phone cases might price them as follows: 1–4 units: $10 each, 5–9 units: $9 each, 10+ units: $8 each. A customer who buys 12 phone cases is charged as follows: 4 cases at $10 = $40, 5 cases at $9 = $45, 3 cases at $8 = $24, totaling $109.
- Quantity discounts (volume-based flat pricing). The final product price is based on the total quantity purchased, even if the quantity spans multiple tiers. Using the same tier structure as above, a customer who buys 12 phone cases is charged: 12 notebooks at $8, totaling $96.
Benefits of Shopify quantity price breaks
- It increases the spend per transaction. Quantity price breaks push customers to buy more in a single order to get a better price, which increases your store's average order value (AOV).
- It improves customer loyalty. Lower prices are a major way to reward customers for their continued patronage. Customers are less likely to shop around when you show them how buying more from your store helps them save money.
- It speeds up inventory turnover. Stock sitting around in your warehouse consumes valuable space and capital. Instead of marking down product prices — which can harm your brand perception — offering quantity price breaks can help you move products quicker.
- It attracts B2B buyers. Business buyers expect to purchase products at lower-than-retail rates. Offering volume-based pricing can help your business reach a new customer segment: B2B buyers.
Method 1. How to create quantity breaks using Shopify's native discounts feature
There is no default setting in Shopify to offer quantity breaks; you can only define one rule per automatic discount. A workaround (which I'll share in detail in the next section) is to create multiple discounts for different quantity tiers. However, this isn't ideal for most stores.
Here are the limitations of Shopify's native discount system for setting up quantity breaks:
- There is no inbuilt support for tiered pricing structures. The workaround I'll show you gets the job done, but it involves several manual steps, which can be time-consuming. Also, compared to using a good quantity breaks app, it's still limited feature-wise, and doesn't deliver the best user experience for admins and customers.
- Price tiers aren’t shown on product pages. There's no inbuilt option to show tiered pricing tables on product detail pages. And since prices on product pages aren't updated in real-time, customers are unclear about prices until they reach the cart page, which creates friction and confusion in the ordering process.
- Discounts are applied at the cart level. With the native system, discounts are applied only after products are added to the shopping cart. Customers can't see the deal until then, which can negatively affect your store's conversion rates.
While it's not perfect, if you're on a budget then this could be a valid way to add Shopify quantity breaks. I'll show you how to set it up next. After that, I'll tell you how to add more flexible quantity breaks using the Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts Shopify app instead.
Tutorial: How to create quantity breaks using native Shopify discounts
As noted, there is no inbuilt setting for creating quantity price breaks within Shopify. However, the workaround I'll show below is to use Shopify's native discount code system to create multiple codes for different quantity tiers.
For this tutorial, let's say you run an online clothing store and want to offer the following price breaks: 5–9 at 10% off, 10–19 at 15% off, and 10–19 at 15% off. You’ll need to create three separate discount codes with different quantity conditions.
Here’s how to set it up step by step:
- Access your Shopify admin, and press "Discounts" in the left-hand sidebar.
- Press Create discount → Amount off products → Discount code.
- Enter the following details to create the first tier for 5–9 units:
- Discount code: Enter a name like BUY5SAVE10.
- Types of discount: Choose Percentage → Enter 10%.
- Applies to: Select Specific products or collections, e.g., t-shirts.
- Minimum purchase requirements: Check the Minimum quantity of items box, then enter 5.
- Eligibility: You can leave it open or restrict it to certain customer groups.
- Maximum discount uses: Leave this blank or set it based on your business logic, if needed.
- Active dates: Add start and end dates if it’s a time-sensitive promo.
- Discount code: Enter a name like BUY5SAVE10.
- Press "Save discount".
- Repeat the same process for different quantity tiers.
The best Shopify app for setting up quantity price breaks
Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts is a powerful app that enables you to offer high-converting quantity price breaks. It enables you to provide various kinds of discounts — think: BOGOF, bundles, combo deals, first-time customer discounts, quantity price breaks, etc.
Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts makes quantity price breaks profitable and easy to manage, and it gives you complete control over how you structure quantity tiers and how they're presented on your store's frontend.
With this quantity breaks Shopify app, you can:
- Fully control price tiers, including choosing exactly how many quantity tiers to offer, whether to discount them by percentage or a fixed amount, and what those tiers look like.
- Apply tiered pricing rules to individual products, specific collections, or your entire catalog. (You can exclude certain products from category-wide and global price tiers).
- Set up custom rules and conditions that dictate how quantity breaks work.
- Set start and end dates to schedule when each quantity price break is active.
- Use eye-catching visual upsell cues in the form of headings, subheadings, and product labels to illustrate the value of your offerings.
Customer review
Method 2: Setting up quantity price breaks in Shopify with Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts
- Add the Barn2 Bundles and Bulk Discounts app to your Shopify site.
- From your Shopify admin, press "Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts" in the left-hand sidebar.
- Create a new discount rule.
- Name your discount.
- Select the Bulk Pricing discount type.
- Specify which products the quantity breaks apply to: all products, all except selected, specific products, and selected collections.
- Specify whether to provide the quantity price breaks indefinitely or for a specified period.
- Define the minimum and maximum quantity per tier and discount structure.
- Toggle on the preview option to customize the heading and description accompanying price tiers presented on product detail pages.
- Choose whether to apply the discount to individual products or the entire shopping cart.
- Design: Select "Theme default" if you'd like the app to inherit your site's theme style or "Custom" to tailor the style as needed.
- Press "Save".
Best practices for profitable quantity price breaks
Once your quantity price break offers are up and running, these six actionable tips will help you make the most of them.
- Tailor pricing tiers to your market, competitors, and customers' purchasing behavior in your store.
- Showcase price tiers clearly on individual product pages and the cart page. Bonus: Use the "heading" and "description" fields in the Barn2 Bundles and Bulk Discounts app to add copy that highlights how much customers can save due to your quantity breaks offer.
- Update the per-unit price of a product in real-time when customers increase the quantity on a product page and in the cart. Note: Barn2’s Bundles & Bulk Discounts handles this seamlessly; it dynamically adjusts product prices and savings as selected quantities change.
- Pair quantity price breaks with other relevant offers — think: cart value thresholds, free shipping thresholds, free gifts, combo deals, cross-sells and upsells, product bundles, etc.
- Keep tabs on which tiers are most sold, product-specific performance, cart abandonment rates when bundles are offered, and other important metrics.
- Communicate quantity discounts across the funnel: in product descriptions, cross-site banners, in-cart messages, marketing emails, etc.
Boost your revenue with Shopify quantity price breaks
A price break is a popular sales strategy that rewards customers for buying more from your ecommerce store. It's also proven to yield good business results in the form of increased revenue, improved customer loyalty, and quicker inventory turnover.
Shopify's default discounts system for offering quantity price breaks is too basic for most stores: it's time-consuming, involves a lot of manual effort, and still doesn't work directly (you'd have to set it up using a workaround).
Barn2 Bundles and Bulk Discounts is a simple-to-use app that makes quantity price breaks profitable and easy to manage. With it, you can offer various types of high-converting discounts, including Buy X Get Y, combo deals, bundle offers, and of course, quantity price breaks.
Plus, it gives you total control over how to structure quantity tiers, enables you to present them in an easy-to-understand table on the frontend of your website together with compelling marketing copy, automatically updates product prices based on the selected product quantity, and more. Get Barn2 Bundles and Bulk Discounts now 🚀