Hi StonyTS, sounds like the discount experience in Shopify has been frustrating so far.
A couple of questions here:
- When you say, “discounts I make up for a percentage off a product group,” are you talking about regular discount codes, or automatic discounts?
If you create an automatic discount that applies to all customers, it should show up on the cart page as well. If you’re talking about regular discounts, then unfortunately yeah, you can’t enter them until checkout. But you can possibly use a “slide cart” app that lets your customers enter discount codes from any page.
- When you say, “show in the online store,” what specifically are you expecting to happen?
Based on what you said about comparison pricing, it sounds like you’re looking for a way to automatically set the compare-at price for a large number of products/variants. This is the exact type of thing I recommend using an app for. I don’t know of any apps for your specific use case, but if one exists, it’ll probably save you hours.
- When you say, “pay for pro,” are you talking about Shopify POS Pro? It’s true that automatic discounts can’t be used in the basic POS. I unfortunately don’t have a solution here, as it’s a platform-level restriction.
If you can answer those questions, I’ll probably be able to help you find a workaround.