One year ago this week, Discount Prime went live on the Shopify App Store. The app that launched in October 2023 did two things: volume discounts and quantity breaks. The app you can install today does considerably more. This post is the honest version of the year in between.
What the year looked like
We launched six weeks before our first BFCM, which in hindsight was either brave or careless, and survived it. Since then the app has shipped, in order: free shipping discounts with a progress bar, buy X get Y offers, tiered pricing, B2B and customer-specific pricing, and, last month, discount analytics.
Some numbers we are comfortable sharing: +900 installs / active stores/orders processed, whichever you want public. The number we watch most closely is not installs; it is how many stores are still actively running campaigns 90 days after installing. Retention is the only review that cannot be charmed.
Three mistakes worth admitting
We underestimated support as a product channel. For the first months, we treated support as an interruption. Somewhere around conversation one hundred, we realized it was the roadmap talking to us. The B2B pricing feature exists because wholesale merchants kept describing the same workaround in support tickets. We wrote about this in March, and it remains the most important lesson of the year.
We shipped settings instead of decisions. Early versions of the app exposed every option we could imagine. Merchants do not want fifteen toggles; they want the app to have an opinion and a good default. We have spent much of the year removing choices, and every removal made the app better.
We waited too long on analytics. For most of the year, merchants could run sophisticated campaigns but could not see which ones made money. Discount analytics shipped in September. It should have shipped in March. The uncomfortable truth is that we prioritized visible features over the one that tells you whether the others are working.
What the platform year looked like
It was a consequential year to be building on Shopify. The Winter and Summer Editions both pushed further into checkout extensibility, and August's checkout. liquid deadline for information and payment pages made the direction unambiguous: custom logic belongs in Functions and extensions now, not in scripts and liquid patches.
We made the Functions bet on day one, which meant this year's platform shifts mostly happened to other apps. That bet keeps paying for itself, and we would make it again. (If you want the fuller version of the build story, we told it in one year of building Discount Prime.)
What is next
Year two has one theme: profit. Analytics was the first step. The next steps take the same idea further, from reporting on margin to actively protecting it while campaigns run. If year one was about giving merchants more ways to discount, year two is about making sure every one of those discounts can defend itself.
BFCM number two is seven weeks away. We will publish our playbook for it later this month, informed by what we watched happen across stores last November.
To every merchant who installed the app in year one, reported a bug, or told us bluntly that a feature was confusing: thank you. The app is what it is because you did.
