Shopify Sidekick can run most of a discount campaign for you from the chat box: it creates the discount in your admin, sets the conditions and dates, and drafts the promotional copy around it. What it won’t do is decide your strategy or guarantee the offer behaves correctly at checkout — that part is on you. Here’s how to run each type of promotion, and where to keep a hand on the wheel.
Set up an automatic checkout discount
Automatic discounts apply at the cart without a code, which is the cleanest way to run a storewide or collection sale. Ask Sidekick to create the discount in your admin and it will walk through the type (percentage, fixed amount, or buy-X-get-Y), the conditions, and the active period.
Give it the specifics up front:
- Discount value and type — e.g.
[YOUR DISCOUNT VALUE]percent off, or a fixed amount off. - Conditions — a minimum spend of
[YOUR MINIMUM AMOUNT]or a minimum quantity, and whether it applies to the whole order or specific collections. - Active window — a clear
[YOUR START DATE]to[YOUR END DATE]so a flash sale actually ends when you intend. - Combination rules — whether it can stack with other discounts or shipping offers.
Then have Sidekick make the savings visible: a cart-level savings line, a product-page note, and an announcement bar stating the offer and its conditions. Always run one real test order before you promote anything — confirm the discount applies, the math is right, and it doesn’t stack in a way that erodes your margin.
Configure a BOGO deal
Buy-one-get-one is a native Shopify buy-X-get-Y automatic discount, and Sidekick can configure the whole thing. The trick is being precise about the two sides of the deal:
- The qualifying (purchased) item — which collection or products the customer has to buy.
- The free or discounted item — which collection or products they get free, half off, etc.
- Usage limits — cap uses per customer so one shopper can’t drain the offer.
- Dates — a defined start and end.
Ask Sidekick to add a homepage banner, callout badges on qualifying product cards, and a short explanation of how the deal works on the product page. BOGO logic is easy to misread, so test the exact combination you advertised: buy the qualifying item and confirm the free item discounts correctly in the cart.
Generate unique codes for influencers and affiliates
When you’re handing individual codes to partners, you want one unique code per person so you can see whose audience converts. Sidekick can generate a batch with a shared rule set — same discount value, same date window, a per-code usage cap, and a naming convention like [YOUR PREFIX]-JANE, [YOUR PREFIX]-MARK.
Two things to confirm:
- Ask for a mapping table — each handle next to its code — so you can send partners their individual codes without a manual spreadsheet.
- Confirm the count. Very large batches can hit a practical limit. Ask Sidekick directly whether it created all
[YOUR NUMBER OF CODES]codes or stopped early, and what the limit was, so you don’t quietly ship a half-finished batch.
Don’t train customers to wait for a sale
This is the strategic half, and it’s where Sidekick gives advice rather than pushing buttons. If you promote constantly, shoppers learn to hold out for the next discount and your full-price conversion drops. Sidekick can give general guidance on this without pulling your specific sales history — signs of discount fatigue, roughly how much promo frequency a category like [YOUR NICHE] can sustain, and alternatives to blanket percentage-off sales.
Practical structure worth asking for:
- Full-price windows — deliberate stretches between sales where nothing is discounted.
- Value-adds over markdowns — free gifts, bundles, or free shipping thresholds that create urgency without a percentage-off code.
- Segment-only offers — a code for lapsed customers or VIPs instead of a storewide banner everyone sees.
If you want Sidekick to analyze your store’s actual promo history and conversion impact, ask for that as a separate, data-backed request — the cadence guidance above is general strategy, not a read of your numbers.
The short version
Sidekick handles the mechanical work of a promotion — creating discounts, batching codes, drafting the announcement copy — quickly and from plain-English prompts. You still own two things it can’t do for you: deciding the strategy, and verifying the offer behaves correctly at checkout. Do those, and Sidekick takes care of the rest.