Hello. We are having an issue with a particular customer who is using nonexistent coupon codes to get free samples of our products. He places an order, pays in full, then a couple days later places another order for a sample where he gets 100% off. He has done this twice. The discount code he uses does not exist and we have searched all possible apps that could have automatically generated a code, but to no avail! I thought perhaps it was an abandoned cart email issue, but no. In fact, when we look at the order conversion summary, it states that he “returned 2 items” but that isn’t true. Is this some sort of weird loophole he found to get free items?
Topic summary
A merchant discovered customers placing orders using discount codes that don’t appear to exist in their system, resulting in 100% discounts on sample products. The codes work despite not being visible in the discount code management interface.
Root Cause Identified:
One merchant traced the issue to codes imported from a previous platform (WooCommerce). An old app had generated random codes that, when migrated to Shopify, displayed incorrectly—showing as two separate codes in the interface but functioning as a single valid code when customers applied them.
Recommended Action:
- Contact Shopify Support directly for account-level investigation, as Community moderators cannot access order details
- Review all imported discount codes from previous platforms
- Delete legacy codes generated by old apps to prevent unauthorized use
Current Status:
Shopify Support was unable to fully explain the technical reason why codes displayed incorrectly but still functioned. The solution involved manually identifying and removing all old app-generated codes.
Hi there @alyssagriego . Thank you for posting this question! I completely understand why you’d want to figure out what is happening.
If you don’t have any discount codes set up and there are no apps generating discounts this definitely shouldn’t be happening. In this case I would recommend reaching out to our live support on this page so that our Support Advisors can review these orders and your account in more detail. I’m not able to see these details over the Community, but they should be able to see what has happened with these orders and help you out further.
Steps to contact a Support Advisor:
- Log in to your account.
- Type in keywords for your issue in the search field and click Search.
- You will then notice common questions and help guides related to your issue. Under that you will see the option to Get support. Click Continue.
- Then you’ll see the options to chat with us, email us, or request a callback.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi, something similar is happening to us. Were you able to figure out the reason or get a resolution from support?
Did you get to a solution on this problem @Megan331 ? Frustrating I’m sure. I don’t have a solution but I’m fascinated by the problem and interested in the cause and fix!
Yes, we were able to figure this out. We had a customer who was using codes that they should not have had access to for discounts. However, when we looked, the codes they were using didn’t exist. Before Shopify, we were using WooCommerce and had an app that was generating random codes. When those were imported into Shopify they were displaying one way, but when you actually opened the code it looked the way that the customer was using them. Shopify was not able to explain why the code was essentially showing as two separate codes and why the codes the customer was using worked, but we were not able to search for them. We ended up end dating all of the old app generated codes.