Creating an offer

An offer says when it appears, after certain products are bought or on every order, and what the customer is offered once they have paid. Open Offers and click Add offer, or open an offer on the list to change it. The form has three steps, When it shows, What it offers and Where it shows, and you can move between them freely before you save. The line at the top of the form says the offer as one sentence, one part for each step. Click a part to open its step. Nothing is saved until you click Save. A change applies from the next order on the post-purchase and Thank you pages, and at once on the Order status page, earlier orders included.

Five ways to start

• Under Ready-made are four offers other stores run. Click one to see what the customer gets, then Start with this: it fills in a discount and the wording, and leaves the products to you.
• Start blank opens an empty offer. Its discount, countdown and pages start from what you set in Settings, under New offers.
• The best pairing for each order, the first row under From your orders until you run one, opens an offer with no product to pick: it chooses one for each order. See the best pairing for each order.
• From one product you pick opens What sells with a product: pick one product and it lists what sells with it, for you to pick from. It ranks the product’s Complementary products, picked in Shopify’s Search & Discovery app, first, then products bought in the same order as it, then products in its collections, then products of the same type, vendor or tag, then your best sellers. Your test orders are left out, and so are orders where Ovation itself sold something.
• Duplicate one of yours appears once you have an offer. It lists your offers: click one and Ovation makes a copy of it, paused until you turn it on, and opens the copy for you to change.

Step 1: When it shows

When they buy

Choose the products or collections that trigger the offer. Buying any one of them is enough. A collection also covers products you add to it later, up to the limit below.

Choose After every order instead and the offer needs no trigger products: it can show on any order, and the conditions below still apply. Your offers are checked in the order the offers list says, so one like this checked before others shows first, and they only show when it does not. Move it to the bottom with Reorder to have it catch the orders the others miss.

Ovation keeps its own copy of which products each collection holds, so a customer is not kept waiting while it asks Shopify. It checks a collection when you save an offer that uses it, again whenever the collection changes, and, once its copy is a day old, the next time you open Ovation or a product in your store changes. Settings, under Collections, shows when each one was last checked, and Refresh collections checks them all again.

Ovation reads the first 2,000 products of a collection. In a larger one, a trigger misses the products after that, and a left-out collection does not stop the offer on them. Settings, under Collections, marks such a collection Partly checked. Split it into smaller collections, or pick the products themselves.

Show it when

Every condition here is optional. Add one with Add a condition and it becomes a line of the offer's sentence; the offer then shows only when every line matches.

• Leave out collections, Product tag, Product type, Variant name, How many of them (how many of the trigger products the order holds) and Subscriptions.
• Order value, Number of items and Currency.
• Ships to, by country code, and Customer's language, by language code.
• Dates and times, a start and an end in the time zone you pick, and Share of customers, which shows the offer to a percentage of the customers it would otherwise reach so you can try it on some of them first.

For Product tag and Product type, Ovation reads the first 2,000 products of each tag or type, as it does for a collection. On a tag or type carried by more, a customer buying one of the others does not see the offer, and the offers list marks it Tag or type too large. Pick the products themselves, or use a tag or type with fewer products.

Ships to is only answered on the post-purchase page. While it is set, the offer does not appear on the Thank you or Order status page. On those two pages, Order value cannot be answered either for an order paid in a currency other than yours, so such an order does not get an offer that sets it.

Try it on a real order

Once an offer is saved, open Walk through it and use this control: it takes the number of a past order and replays that order against the offer as it is saved now. It answers yes, no, or that the conditions match but the offer did not show, with the reason, and links to the whole replay on the Orders page. The first step has a link that opens it.

Step 2: What it offers

Offer them

Pick the exact variants to offer. You can offer several products, and give any of them its own discount. When their order already contains one of these products decides what happens to a product the customer just bought: Skip it, which every offer starts on, or Offer it again, for things that run out. With What this offer sells, an offer can sell one more of the dearest or the cheapest item of the order in place of picked products, on the post-purchase page only. Or it can sell The best pairing for each order, which chooses the product for each order: see the best pairing for each order. A picked product is dropped from the offer as soon as Shopify says it cannot be bought. Stock is checked when you save, and again each time Shopify tells Ovation the product changed.

When an offer has several products, How they are shown decides the order:

• Show them together, one at a time: on the post-purchase page, the customer steps through the whole list on one page.
• Show the next one if they decline: a no moves on to the next product. With Add a counter-offer you can send a no to a different product, such as a cheaper one or a bigger discount.

Keep offering after they accept shows the next product to a customer who said yes, too. The app-wide choice for both is in Settings, under Post-purchase page, and an offer can keep its own.

A/B test

Once an offer is saved, Test a second version sits under its products and starts an A/B test on it. A running test sits in a band above the products. See A/B tests.

Discount

A percentage of the price or A fixed amount, taken off each variant’s price. A fixed amount at or above a product’s price would make it free, so checkout skips that product. To give a product away, use 100% off. Every product in the offer gets this discount unless you give it one of its own.

Wording

What the customer reads appears under each product’s name. Left blank, each product shows its own description. The post-purchase page shows it unless you hide descriptions in Settings, under Post-purchase page. The Thank you and Order status pages show it only once you turn Description on in Settings, under Thank you and Order status pages.

Countdown

Show a countdown on the offer puts a clock on the post-purchase page, for the number of minutes you choose. It appears on the post-purchase page only. Shopify shows that page once and never again, so the offer really does end when the customer leaves it. At zero the clock stops and the offer stays as it was: nothing is withdrawn. With it on, a customer who saw the countdown on the post-purchase page is not shown this offer again on the Thank you or Order status page. If another offer matches the order, that one shows there instead.

Step 3: Where it shows

Ovation can show an offer on three pages: the post-purchase page, the Thank you page and the Order status page. Each has a switch here, and turning one off makes this offer skip that page. The post-purchase page adds the product to the order that was just paid for. The other two pages cannot, so there the button starts a new checkout with the product in it. Those two pages also need a block you add once in the checkout editor; see Showing Ovation on four more pages.

Show this offer, at the top of the offer’s page on every step, pauses the offer or turns it back on. Pausing keeps every setting.

The best pairing for each order

One offer, nothing to pick. For each order, Ovation chooses the product that goes best with what was just bought, so different orders get different products. Everything else is set as on any offer: what triggers it, the discount, the wording and the pages.

6 signals, in rank order

• 1Complementary The Complementary products you set in Shopify’s Search & Discovery app for a product in the order.
• 2Bought together Bought with a product in the order in 2 or more of your paid orders. More orders together ranks higher, and an order from three months ago counts half as much as one from today.
• 3Earlier orders Bought together with something this customer bought in the last 365 days. Post-purchase page only: see below.
• 4Related Shopify’s own Related products for a product in the order, once you allow them on the offer’s What it offers step.
• 5Same type Another product of the same product type as one in the order.
• 6Best seller Your most ordered product, when nothing above pairs.

The first signal that finds a product it can offer wins. It pairs with anything in the order, not only the products that trigger the offer, and when nothing can be offered, the next offer on your list can answer. Your test orders and orders where Ovation sold something are not counted.

8 things it never offers

• In the order
• Gift cards
• Not on the Online Store
• Draft, Unlisted or Archived
• Sold out
• Subscription only
• Priced at 0
• In a collection this offer leaves out

Up to 3 products after payment, 1 on the Thank you and Order status pages

Products on the page sets how many products the post-purchase page shows for the order: each a different one, best first, the next ones further down the same signals. Fewer show when fewer can be sold.

• Post-purchase page: 1 to 3 products. The only page that reads earlier orders.
• Thank you and Order status pages: 1 product, chosen from the order. A product the customer left unanswered on the post-purchase page comes back; after a yes or a no there, the next product does.

365 days of earlier orders

On the post-purchase page, Ovation asks Shopify for this customer’s orders of the last 365 days as the page opens, and keeps none of them. With them it chooses the products again: they feed the third signal. Under When the product it chooses is something the customer bought before, Skip it leaves out what they bought in them, Offer it again lets it back in, and Offer it again when it's due lets it back in only once they last bought it longer ago than your customers usually wait before buying it again.

Shopify has 400 milliseconds to answer. When it has not, or the page has waited a second for the answer, the page shows the products chosen without them: the other signals still choose, and a product bought before can then be offered.

See what it chose

• Orders: open an order to see the product chosen for it and the signal that chose it.
• Analytics: Products the best pairing chose lists every product it chose with what it sold, Why they were chosen adds up each signal, and How product 1, 2 and 3 did compares the cards.

The offers list

• Each offer shows its status: Active, Paused, Nothing to offer when it has no product left to offer, No trigger when every product and collection that triggered it was deleted in Shopify, Nothing left in stock when Shopify reports every product it offers as out of stock, or Scheduled or Ended when it is outside its dates, with the day it starts or ended on a line under it. An offer marked Nothing to offer or No trigger stays paused, and cannot be turned back on until you pick a product or a new trigger. An offer marked Nothing left in stock is skipped on every page until a product is back in stock, and its orders go to the next offer that matches. An offer marked Draft or Archived is skipped the same way until one of its products is set to Active in Shopify, which sells a Draft or Archived product on no channel. One marked Draft, Archived or sold out has some products Draft or Archived and the rest out of stock, and is skipped until one is Active and in stock. The Scheduled and Ended tabs list each kind. A running A/B test that counts nothing right now reads A/B test not counting, with the reason behind its (i). Any other warning badge on the offer’s name line says what holds the offer back on some or all of its pages, and where a step fixes it, a link beside the badge opens that step.
• When two offers could both show on one order, the one checked first is shown, and only one offer is shown per page. A sentence over the list says the order your offers are checked in, and each offer says its place under its name. Reorder, the link beside that sentence, lets you move offers up and down.
• Duplicate copies an offer. The copy is paused until you turn it on.
• Deleting an offer removes its products, triggers and wording. Pausing keeps all of that. Deleting an offer with a running A/B test ends the test and keeps its results, and the offer’s name stays on your figures and orders, marked as deleted.