Enhancing Discounts

At a glance

Challenge: Big Cartel's discount engine hadn't changed since 2015. Merchants couldn't restrict codes to one use per customer, combine free shipping with a percent off, or target discounts by what was in the cart.
Approach: Shipped in two waves: single-use restrictions and automatic discounts first, then geo-restrictions, discount stacking, and multi-product targeting once the foundation was in place.
Outcome: Free-to-paid conversion on discount CTAs rose from 6.69% to 11.4%; Platinum-to-Diamond conversion rose from 0.61% to 5.17%.
Role: Principal Product Manager
Team: Me, 1 designer, 2 engineers
Timeline: October 2024 – March 2025

The problem

Our discount engine was stuck in 2015. Merchants had been asking for years: let me restrict codes to one use per customer. Let me combine free shipping with a percent off. Let me give customers discounts based on what's in their cart. We finally listened.

We split this into two waves for a technical reason as much as a scope one. The old discount admin ran on a mix of Stencil and Rails, a combination our engineers didn't enjoy working in and one that made anything beyond small additions painful. Layering in stacking, multi-product targeting, and geo-restrictions would have been a heavy lift on that legacy form, so we shipped what fit first. Wave two landed after we migrated the admin off that stack, which is what made the harder features feasible.

We shipped this in two waves

•October 2024: Single-use restrictions and automatic discounts went live.
•March 2025: Added geo-restrictions, discount stacking, multi-product targeting, and fixed per-order logic that had been broken for years.

What merchants built with it

Manual, Entire Order

Automatic, Entire Order

Manual, Single Category

Automatic, Single Category

+6 More

28.5K

Multi-use, Anywhere

Single-use, Anywhere

Multi-use, Domestic only

Single-use, Domestic only

+2 More

15.0K

Simple over sophisticated

Sellers asked for geo-restrictions on discounts, but we didn't build country-by-country targeting. Instead we simplified it to a single select: free shipping everywhere, free shipping domestically, or free shipping internationally, each based on the seller's shop location. That gave sellers the flexibility they were asking for without a level of sophistication most of them didn't actually want.

Discount stacking followed the same logic. Sellers wanted to combine discounts, but full stacking would have meant rewriting checkout, which wasn't on the table. So we looked at what sellers were actually trying to do, and most of the time it was pairing free shipping with a product discount. We shipped that combination as its own setting, with the same geo-restrictions applied.

The impact on upgrades

Discount features weren't just nice-to-have — they were driving upgrade decisions.

After shipping single-use restrictions and automatic discounts in October 2024, we saw free-to-paid conversion improve from 6.69% to 11.4% on discount-related CTAs.

The Diamond story was even more dramatic. Features like discount stacking and multi-product targeting increased Platinum-to-Diamond conversion from 0.61% to 5.17%. We'd unlocked a monetization lever that barely worked before.

Turns out when you give merchants tools they've been asking for, they're willing to pay for them.

Previous • 6.69%

Current • 11.38%

100%75%50%25%0%

6.69%

11.4%

1 Clicked discount upgrade CTA

2 Started paid subscription

Previous • 0.61%

Current • 5.17%

100%75%50%25%0%

0.61%

5.17%

1 Clicked Diamond upgrade CTA

2 Upgraded to Diamond

Key Takeaways

Build what you can, when you can.

We didn't wait for a full rewrite to ship value. Wave one shipped what fit on the existing admin, and wave two picked up the harder features once the migration made them possible.

Listen for what customers are actually asking for.

Sellers described geo-restrictions and discount stacking, but what they needed was simpler: free shipping by region, and the ability to pair it with a product discount. We built the simple version instead of the sophisticated one they described.