How do I add a free gift with purchase on Shopify?
Short answer: Shopify’s Buy X get Y discount can make a gift free, but it never advertises the offer and the shopper has to add the gift by hand. Libautech Bundles & Upsell runs free gift with purchase, BOGO, and progressive gift offers that show on the page itself. 4.9 stars across 35 reviews, from $9.99 a month.
A free gift with purchase is the promotion shoppers remember. Nobody tells a friend about 10% off. A free travel pouch with the $80 skincare set? That gets mentioned. And unlike a discount, the gift never touches your headline price, which matters more than most merchants realize once you start running promotions every month.
We build Shopify apps ourselves (variant images and combined listings), so we watch how stores assemble their promotion stack with professional curiosity. Plenty of the stores you admire run their gift offers through an app, and you can see exactly which one with our free app detector. But before you install anything, it’s worth knowing what Shopify gives you out of the box, where it stops, and what the app layer actually adds. That’s this post.
In this post
- Why a free gift beats another discount
- How do you set up a free gift with purchase on Shopify without an app?
- How do you show the gift offer before checkout?
- What is a progressive gift ladder?
- How much does it cost?
- Is it right for your store?
- FAQ
Why a free gift beats another discount
Here’s an opinion we’ll defend: the sitewide percentage discount is the laziest promotion in ecommerce. It trains shoppers to wait for the next one, it compresses your margin on every single order, and it teaches your best customers that your list price is negotiable. A gift does none of that. The product’s price stays intact, the shopper gets something extra, and you decide what the “extra” costs you, which is usually your wholesale cost, not your retail price.
There’s an inventory angle too. The gift doesn’t have to be a bestseller. It can be the colorway that didn’t sell, the accessory you over-ordered, the sample size you want gone. Same logic as BOGO: use the slow stock as the free item, and you clear inventory without discounting anything a full-price buyer was going to purchase anyway. Two problems, one promotion.
So why doesn’t every store run one? Because on Shopify, doing it properly takes a bit more than creating a discount. Let’s start with the built-in way.
How do you set up a free gift with purchase on Shopify without an app?
Shopify’s built-in discount engine can technically do a free gift with purchase. You use the Buy X get Y discount type and set the Y side to 100% off:
- In Shopify admin, go to Discounts and click Create discount.
- Choose Buy X get Y.
- Under “Customer buys”, set the qualifying product, collection, or minimum purchase amount.
- Under “Customer gets”, pick the gift product and set the discounted value to 100% off (that’s what makes it free).
- Set it as an automatic discount so nobody needs a code, save, and test it in your own cart.
Free, native, and it works. For a small store running one simple offer, honestly, it might be enough. But run it on a real storefront for a week and the gaps show up fast. Nothing on the product page mentions the offer. Nothing in the cart announces it. And the part that genuinely baffles us: the shopper has to find the gift product in your catalog and add it to the cart themselves before the discount applies. The cart knows the condition is met. The discount exists. And Shopify still waits for the customer to go hunt down their own free gift. Why? It’s been like this for years, and it quietly kills most native gift offers, because a promotion nobody sees is a promotion that doesn’t exist.
Which is kinda the whole point. A gift with purchase isn’t a pricing mechanic, it’s merchandising. The value is in the shopper seeing “spend $15 more and the pouch is free” at the exact moment they’re deciding. Take away the announcement and you’re left with a discount that only reward-hunters who read your fine print will ever trigger.
How do you show the gift offer before checkout?
This is where an app earns its fee. Libautech Bundles & Upsell puts the gift and BOGO offer on the product page and in the cart drawer, where the shopper actually decides. It’s built by Libautech, a studio in Liepāja, Latvia that has been on the App Store since 2021, and it carries the Built for Shopify badge with 4.9 stars across 35 reviews as of August 2026. We reviewed the app in full earlier this month; the short version is that it covers the whole offer family, not just gifts: fixed bundles, volume discounts, frequently bought together, product add-ons, BOGO, and cart upsells, each one styled to match your theme.
One of the reviews on the listing describes exactly the pattern this post is about. A US kitchenware store runs a free cutlery set with its main plate product, promoted right on the product page:
“This app has been a great addition to our store. It makes it super easy to highlight promotions right on the product page so customers clearly see the offer.”
DropLess Plate, United States, August 2025, Libautech Bundles & Upsell on the Shopify App Store
That store’s offer, per the same review, is a spoon and fork set free with the purchase of their plate. Notice what changed versus the native method: the shopper is told about the gift before adding to cart, not after digging through a discounts page they never visit. If you want the full feature-by-feature breakdown from the vendor’s side, Libautech’s own page for the app walks through every offer type with examples, including one we found genuinely novel: you can connect the app to Claude AI through its MCP server, describe the offer in plain English, and let the AI draft and publish it for you.
What is a progressive gift ladder?
A single gift threshold is good. A ladder is better. Progressive gifts mean the cart earns a free gift at, say, $75, and a better one at $150, with a visible progress bar pulling the shopper toward the next step. Libautech supports this pattern out of the box, and it’s the one we’d reach for first, because it turns the gift from a static promo into a live game the shopper is playing against their own cart total. Ever noticed how free-shipping progress bars make you add one more item? Same psychology, better prize.
The cart drawer is where the ladder lives, and it’s also where last-minute offers fire: a discounted add-on after the first item lands in the cart, or a popup before the shopper leaves for checkout. One widget, one design system, instead of a gift app fighting a cart app for the same pixels. Worried about what your product page already loads before adding one more script? Run your store through our free store analyzer first and see your current app stack for yourself.
How much does it cost?
Pricing is tied to the additional revenue the app generates, so the plan grows as the results grow. Every tier includes unlimited offer types and a 7-day free trial.
| Plan | Price | App-attributed revenue | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | $9.99/mo | Up to $500 | Unlimited offer types |
| Starter | $14.99/mo | Up to $2,000 | Multiple layouts, full customization, live chat |
| Pro | $29.99/mo | Up to $10,000 | Real-time analytics, priority chat |
| Unlimited | $49.99/mo | Unlimited | Full customization, priority chat |
We say this as developers who charge flat fees ourselves: the revenue-band model is a fair way to price a promotion app. A store whose gift offer produces $300 in extra orders pays $9.99. When the same offer is producing five figures, the app is on the $49.99 plan and has clearly paid for itself many times over. You move up only when the numbers already justify it.
Is it right for your store?
If your promotion calendar includes gifts, BOGO, bundles, or volume deals in any combination, one app that runs the whole family is the simpler setup, and this one has five years of App Store history plus the Built for Shopify badge behind it. If you only ever run bundles and nothing else, a dedicated bundle builder like the ones in our bundle apps roundup may go deeper on that single job, and our upsell apps roundup maps the rest of the field by where each app fires. Merchants who tried it firsthand tend to mention the support team:
“It works! A few teething problems but support could have not been more helpful investing quite a bit of time to track down our specific problems Top job!”
Classic Dressage Collection, United Kingdom, November 2025, Libautech Bundles & Upsell on the Shopify App Store
Two catalog details worth sorting out before the offer goes live. If your gift or bundle products come in several colors, make sure the product page shows the right photo when a variant is picked; that’s a job for variant image swatches, not a bundle app. And if you sell colors as separate products, group them with combined listings first, so your gift offer attaches to one listing instead of being duplicated across five.
Frequently asked questions
Can Shopify add a free gift to the cart automatically?
Not with the built-in Buy X get Y discount. Shopify makes the gift free once it’s in the cart, but the shopper has to add the gift themselves, and nothing on the product page or in the cart promotes the offer. Apps like Libautech Bundles & Upsell close that gap by displaying the gift offer on the page and in the cart drawer.
How do I set up buy one get one free on Shopify?
Natively, create a Buy X get Y discount with Y at 100% off, set it to automatic, and the deal applies once both items are in the cart. To actually advertise the BOGO on your product page and use it to move slow stock, run it through an offer app, which displays the deal where shoppers see it.
What is a progressive free gift offer?
A gift ladder with more than one threshold: for example a free gift at $75 and a better one at $150, with a progress bar showing the shopper how close they are. It works like a free-shipping bar but with a stronger prize, and it’s one of the offer types Libautech Bundles & Upsell supports.
How much does Libautech Bundles & Upsell cost?
Plans start at $9.99 a month and scale with the extra revenue the app generates: up to $500 on Launch, up to $2,000 on Starter ($14.99), up to $10,000 on Pro ($29.99), and unlimited on the $49.99 plan. All offer types are included on every plan, each with a 7-day free trial.
Will gift and BOGO offers match my theme?
Yes. Every offer type in Libautech is customizable, colors, layout, and text, so the widgets follow your brand instead of looking bolted on. The app is Built for Shopify certified, which covers Shopify’s performance and integration standards, and its offers render on product pages and in the cart drawer without theme file edits.
Related reading
- Do you need separate apps for Shopify bundles and upsells?
- Best Shopify bundle apps 2026
- Best Shopify upsell apps 2026
- Add color swatches to your Shopify product pages
- Shopify combined listings explained
Start with one gift, one threshold, one month. Pick the product your buyers already love, attach a gift that costs you little and reads as generous, and put the offer where people can see it. If the order value moves, add the second rung of the ladder. The 7-day trial is long enough to find out.
Umid
Co-Founder at Craftshift