Product Discount API Multiple Automatic Discounts limit

Retired Boards Appdev Functions

Topic summary

Core Issue:
Developers using Shopify Functions to create automatic product discounts are hitting a strict limit of 5 active app-based automatic discounts per store (not per app). This contradicts documentation suggesting up to 25 automatic discounts are possible, though that applies to manually created discounts, not app-generated ones.

Key Limitations:

  • The 5-discount cap is shared across all installed apps on a store
  • Prevents merchants from setting up tiered customer discounts, scheduled promotions, or complex discount strategies
  • Particularly problematic for enterprise clients migrating from Shopify Scripts to Functions

Workarounds:

  • One developer created multiple discount tiers within a single discount rule using customer metafields (“Tier 1”, “Tier 2”, etc.) to work around the limit
  • This approach has UX drawbacks: only generic discount titles display at checkout, not specific tier amounts

Status & Frustration:

  • Shopify acknowledged the issue over a year ago and promised to increase the limit and improve documentation
  • No timeline provided despite repeated requests
  • Merchants and developers express significant frustration that this limitation undermines Shopify’s sales-focused features and B2B functionality
Summarized with AI on November 11. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
6

In the end I created a UI with the number of tiers I needed and that seemed to work.

The only issue I haven’t worked out yet is that if I have 5 tiers with different discount amounts it only shows the title of the discount rule which is generic “Loyalty scheme” whereas I would like “Loyalty scheme 5%”, “Loyalty scheme 10%” etc.

I guess there would be a performance impact if you allowed a lot more automatic discounts as it would have to check them all and then work out which apply and which don’t etc.

Cheers Dan