Gift rewards are a powerful way to incentivize customers to spend more (increase AOV) and purchase now (increase conversion). This guide will walk you through the process of setting up a free gift product that you can use as a reward.
We highly recommend setting your gift rewards as free products, particularly when you decide to use the auto-added gift. Otherwise you will create confusion for the customer and might reduce conversion (although it is possible for the customer to remove gift products again). Also, the point of gifts is to increase AOV by wanting the customer to reach the gift, not through the gift itself.
If you already have a product that you want to offer as a gift:
Navigate to your Shopify admin panel
Find the product you wish to use as a gift
Click Duplicate in the top right.
When duplicating your product:
Keep the same SKU as the original product
If you use a third party warehouse, they will typically own the stock and sync it back to your store by SKU, keeping the stock at both products in sync and up to date.
For your gift product:
Set the price to $0.00 or "Free"
Tip: Set a compare-at price to display the original value and savings to your customer!
EliteCart includes a smart way of prohibiting customers from adding gifts directly to cart:
Simply change the product type to _elite_gift
If a customer then tries to add the product to cart, they will see an error message instead. You can edit this message in the app under Language & translations
If you want to prohibit customers from accessing the gift’s product page at all:
Add the following product tag to the relevant product _elite_block_page
If a customer tries to access the page, they will be redirected back to the page they came from, as long as it's in your online store. Otherwise, they will be redirected to your homepage.
Alternatively, you could keep the product page accessible and display a text (e.g. use the product description) on how to reach the reward and claim the gift. You might want to create a custom product template for these products (in your theme) where you disable or hide the Add to Cart button completely for a better user experience.
If you want to prevent customers from finding the gift’s product page in your store at all, you should both exclude it from collections and follow step 7 below.
In your Shopify admin dashboard go to the product page. Under “Collections”, you can see which collections this product is part of.
Then go to each of these collections and exclude the product. For automatic collections you could use the product type or specific tags.
To hide the product from appearing in store search and google search:
Configure the SEO meta field that Shopify provides and set it for the relevant product
Follow our detailed instructions in this article:
Hiding Addons and Gifts from Search and SEO
Use clear, enticing product images and descriptions
Set smart thresholds for claiming the gift. Look at your average order value and set it a little higher than that.
Use gifts with high perceived value, but low costs. Also consider shipping costs (low volume and weight) of the gift.
Consider rotating gift products from time to time to keep customers engaged
Monitor which gifts drive the most engagement
You might wonder why EliteCart doesn't apply discounts to existing products rather than requiring you to set up separate free gift products. While Shopify does support both manual and automatic discount codes, we've found this approach creates significant limitations for almost all merchants.
Shopify's discount logic has inherent restrictions that make it difficult to stack multiple promotions. If you're running any other discount campaigns—such as:
Free shipping promotions
Influencer discount codes
Seasonal sale campaigns
First-time customer discounts
These will often conflict with reward-based discounts unless every single discount in your store is configured to "combine with other discounts." However, that is not feasible for most stores, because such discount rules can lead to:
Unexpected discount combinations that hurt your margins
Customer confusion when discounts don't apply as expected
Technical issues with discount code stacking
Why free products work better
By using free gift products instead of discount codes, EliteCart bypasses Shopify's discount limitations entirely. Your reward system operates independently of your discount campaigns, ensuring:
No conflicts with existing promotional strategies
Predictable customer experience regardless of other active discounts
Complete control over which products can be claimed as rewards
Clear inventory tracking and reporting for gift items
This approach gives you the flexibility to run multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously without worrying about discount logic conflicts or unexpected promotional combinations.
If anything is unclear or you run into issues, just reach out and we are happy to help.
