Whoever thought is was a good idea to get rid of the POS line item discount of X amount and switch it to “Amount per unit” has obviously never worked in retail before. This one small change has effectively jacked up so many ways of operating for us. We HATE it. HATE. I don’t need my employees doing math to determine how much per unit equals $3 off when the customer is buying several of the same thing. JUST GIVE US THE OPTION TO SELECT “X AMOUNT”, like you give us the option to select percentage and amount per unit. Your updates are supposed to make things easier, not more difficult. Please give us this option back!
You’re not imagining the change. Shopify’s current POS documentation says that in POS 11.5 or later, a monetary line-item custom discount is applied per unit. I also can’t find a native setting that switches that line back to one total dollar amount.
If the whole cart should receive $3 off, a cart-level fixed amount is still available. But for one line in a mixed cart, that isn’t equivalent. Shopify documents third-party app discounts using Discount Functions as the extensibility route, which is much heavier than the old staff workflow.
For a useful feature request, I would give Shopify Support one concrete example: quantity 4, total line discount $3, the old taps versus the current divide-to-$0.75-per-unit flow, plus how often staff need to do this each day. That makes the lost workflow and labor impact explicit.
Official references:
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/sell-in-person/shopify-pos/discount-management/overview
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/sell-in-person/shopify-pos/discount-management/applying-discounts
Does this happen mostly with common quantities such as 2, 3, or 4, or with arbitrary quantities? That determines whether a small preset workaround could help or whether only a restored total-line option really solves it.
Thanks for reaching out. My point is we shouldn’t have to do a work around. Just bring back the option they took away. If it’s a software capacity thing, then let us choose which 2 options we would like to show on the POS. From the beginning our business was built on offering a bulk buy discount on the purchase of multiple same kind products. For instance, Buy 3 Bubble Bombs, Save $5. Now if they buy 3 of the same one, we now have to do math to get the per item price (which won’t be correct, by the way because it is divided by 3). I can’t do the innate Shopify Buy X, Get Y, because then no chart shows on my website under Bubble Bombs telling them the more they buy, the more they save. I currently use another app that does volume discounts and puts this on every product page, but it doesn’t support POS. We were doing the discount manually in store, and when the change happened back in April it has been a very real pain point. It would be far easier for Shopify to bring back an option they use to give us than to make tens of thousands of merchants try to figure out yet another work around. We are supposed to be running our businesses, manufacturing, selling, not trying to figure out how to make software work for us that we pay thousands of dollar a year to make things easier.
Hey, you’re right about the line-item change. On POS 11.5+, a custom monetary discount on one line is per unit, and there isn’t a setting to flip that back to one total dollar amount for that line.
For the recurring Bubble Bombs deal (buy 3, save $5), skip staff math and put it in admin as an automatic Amount off products discount: apply to that product, fixed amount $5, minimum quantity 3, and turn on Only apply discount once per order so it doesn’t multiply oddly. On POS Pro locations, tick Also offer on Point of Sale so it drops on when qty hits 3. That is separate from Buy X get Y, so it won’t force a free item.
One-off weird totals on a mixed cart still work better as a cart-level fixed custom discount than as a line discount.
Worth sending Support the exact Buy 3 / Save $5 staff flow as a feature request too.
That’s a fair point. A simple “$X off” option would be much easier for retail staff and would reduce unnecessary calculations at checkout. Hopefully they bring this option back.
yeah, the per-unit requirement is especially awkward when the discount is being decided at the transaction level rather than per item. if someone wants to take $3 off the total of a purchase, making the cashier calculate how that $3 should be divided across the items is just unnecessary friction.
i’d much rather have all three options available: percentage, fixed amount off the transaction, and amount per unit. stores use those differently depending on how their promotions and staff discounts are structured, so removing one of them doesn’t really simplify anything for the people actually using POS.
Hi there @Roshan_Richards
I also agree that total discount with fixed amount is much more preferred in pos when the customer buy multiple units. A simple way around is to calculate the per unit amount prior to the discount, though it does add a few steps unnecessarily for the employees. A good POS flow would be to choose a fixed amount for the entire line: that is, a dollar instead of a percentage or a per unit amount. This would reduce error and speed up the checkout significantly for retailers who deal in regular multi quantity sales.