Give a free gift with every order

What a shopper actually sees

A gift with nothing left to decide is added to the cart on its own. No banner to notice, no button to find, no code to paste. The shopper sees a line at $0.00 with the normal price struck through beside it, and the cart total does not move.

A gift with a choice behind it works differently. If you have offered three products, or one product in five sizes, the shopper is asked once and the gift is added straight after. They are never asked twice, and turning it down does not make it disappear for good.

Pin the variant, or let them pick

This one decision changes the whole feel of the offer. Pin a single variant and the gift is silent: it appears, the shopper notices at checkout, and nobody has to do anything. That is the right call for a product with one option, or where the variant genuinely does not matter.

The moment size or colour is involved, silence becomes a returns problem. Leave the variant open and the shopper chooses their own, which is slower by one tap and much cheaper than shipping a medium to someone who wears a large.

Offering several products works the same way. Approve a shortlist, and the shopper picks the one they want rather than receiving the one you guessed at.

It does not have to be free

Free is the obvious setting and often the wrong one. A gift set to twenty percent off still reads as a reward, still gets added to the cart automatically, and costs you a fraction of what giving it away does.

Every product in the gift carries its own pricing, so one gift can hand over a candle outright and take ten dollars off a more expensive item beside it. You are not forced to price the whole reward at one level because it happens to be one offer.

Protecting the stock you still need to sell

The failure mode with free gifts is not cost, it is running out of something you were relying on. Set the number of units you want held back and the offer steps aside before it touches them. The gift stops being offered while the product carries on selling normally.

Rank a backup behind it and the tier does not go quiet at all. When the first choice sells out or would break into your reserve, the next product on the list is offered instead. That happens on its own, with nothing to republish and no gap where shoppers see an offer you cannot honour.

Gifts for subscribers only

A gift can require a subscription rather than merely allow one, which turns it into a reason to switch at exactly the moment the shopper is choosing between one time and recurring. You can also pin the gift to a specific selling plan, so it comes with the monthly plan and not the annual one.

When a ladder is the better answer

One gift behind one threshold is the simplest offer you can run and it works. It stops working when you want the reward to grow with the basket. If a shopper who spends $200 should get more than one who spends $80, you want tiered free gifts instead, where each threshold unlocks its own reward and the cart shows how far away the next one is.

Start here anyway. A single gift running for a fortnight tells you whether your customers respond to gifts at all, which is the question worth answering before you build a ladder.