Gift With Purchase on Shopify: Checkout Blocks, Functions, or No App at All?

Gift with purchase looks like one feature, but on Shopify it's really two jobs: get the gift into the cart, and make it free. Every approach you'll read about handles those two jobs differently, and most disappointment with gift offers comes from assuming a tool does both when it only does one.

Here are the three real options, with what each one actually does.

Option 1: the built-in Buy X Get Y discount

Every Shopify plan includes Buy X Get Y discounts, as a discount code or an automatic discount. Buy the qualifying product, get the gift product free or discounted. No app, no code, live in five minutes.

The catch is in Shopify's own documentation: customers must add all items to their cart manually, and the free or discounted item is never automatically added. Your customer has to know the gift exists, find it, and add it themselves. For a self-serve "add your free tote at checkout" promo with good marketing around it, that's workable. For a surprise-and-delight gift that just appears, it isn't.

Start here anyway. If conversion on the offer matters more than polish, this is free and reliable.

Option 2: Checkout Blocks, with eyes open

Checkout Blocks is Shopify's free checkout customization app, and we covered the full feature map in our Checkout Blocks 101 post. For gift offers specifically, two facts matter:

1. Its discount features are Shopify Plus only, like almost everything in the app beyond Thank you and Order status page content.
2. Those discounts are order and shipping discounts, not product discounts. You can build a conditional rule like "when the cart contains the gift and subtotal is over $100, take $25 off the order." The math works out free, but the gift line still shows its normal price, and nothing adds the gift to the cart for you.

That's a legitimate setup for some offers, especially when you're already on Plus and already using the app. But if you want the gift line to read $0.00 with a "Free gift" label, an order discount can't draw that.

Option 3: a discount function, the polished version

A product discount function zeroes out the gift line itself, with a label, recalculated on every cart change. Remove the qualifying product and the gift price comes back. This is the modern replacement for the gift-with-purchase Scripts that stop working on June 30, 2026, and we walked through the build in our Functions gift guide.

The function only handles the "make it free" job. Getting the gift into the cart automatically is still separate work, done in your theme or with an app, and the two halves have to agree on the rules. Functions also live inside apps, so the practical paths are a public app that does this, or a custom build, which requires Plus when the app is custom to your store.

Picking between them

Whichever route you take, test the ugly cases: a cart that just misses the threshold, the customer removing the qualifying item after the gift lands, and two gifts in the cart when the offer should free one.

If your offer has outgrown the built-in discount and you want it built properly, that's work we do. The 25-idea Functions Playbook includes the gift pattern and the constraints around it, free.