A Gift With Purchase (GWP) offer automatically adds a free or discounted gift to a customer's cart when their cart meets conditions you define — for example, spending over a threshold or buying specific products. GWP offers build brand loyalty, help you move targeted inventory (buy X, get Y), and raise average order value by encouraging customers to spend more to unlock the gift.

This article walks through creating a Gift With Purchase widget end to end: creating the widget, defining the qualifying rules, discounting the gift, installing it, configuring every setting, and how gifts are validated at checkout.

The Gift With Purchase widget is a headless widget: it has no visual interface for the customer. It works silently in the background, automatically adding the gift to the cart the moment the cart matches your Data Source rules. There is no button, popup, or product card for the shopper to interact with.

Because it is headless, this widget is the right choice when you want the gift added automatically with no customer action. If you instead want a visible gift promotion — a progress meter toward a reward, or a "choose your gift" experience — use one of these instead:

To create the widget, in Rebuy Admin go to Merchandising Widgets, create a new widget, and select the Gift With Purchase type. This opens the widget editor, where the remaining steps are configured.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin — creating a new Gift With Purchase widget)

The Data Source defines the cart conditions a customer must meet to receive the gift, and which product is returned as the gift. In the widget editor, find Data Source and click the Edit link to open the connected Data Source Rule Builder or click Create new data source to build a new one.

(Image above: Gift with Purchase widget editor — Edit Data Source)

A Data Source rule follows an IF / RETURN pattern. For example:

Follow these guidelines when building GWP conditions to avoid the most common problems:

(Image above: Data Source Rule Builder — IF Cart Subtotal Is Greater Than X RETURN free product)

Discounting is what makes the gift free (or reduced). Rebuy applies the discount using Shopify Functions, configured on the widget editor's Discount tab. Without a discount, the widget will add the product to the cart but the customer will be charged full price for it.

To make the gift free, configure the discount as follows:

(Image above: Gift with Purchase widget editor's Discount tab — Use Discounted By Functions toggle with discount Percentage set to 100%)

Installation makes the widget live on your storefront. In the widget editor, click the Install link in the top-right of the editor header. A new window opens with instructions specific to your theme — follow them carefully, as they may include copying and pasting code or configuring theme settings.

The Gift With Purchase widget is a global widget (it is not tied to a single page). If you install it manually, copy the HTML Div Placement snippet from the widget editor's Advanced screen into your theme where the widget should initialize.

For definitions of "installed," "uninstalled," and "live mode," see Rebuy Widget Installation Definitions.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor showing a two step annotated setup: step 1 highlights the "Live Mode" toggle turned off with the instruction "Toggle OFF Live Mode, Click Save", and step 2 highlights the "INSTALL" button with the instruction "Install to Shopify Online Store")

(Image above: Widget editor Install button and theme editor install flow)

Live Mode controls whether the installed widget is active for customers. Live Mode is ON by default when you create a widget. Before you finish installing — if you want to test the widget without customers seeing it — toggle Live Mode OFF first. Turn it on when you are ready for the offer to go live.

Preview mode lets you test a Gift With Purchase offer on your live storefront without any customers being able to trigger it. This is the recommended way to confirm the offer works before turning it on. Because the widget is headless, previewing means confirming the gift auto-adds and is correctly discounted — there is no visual widget to inspect.

When Live Mode is OFF, the widget is installed but does not fire for regular visitors. To test it yourself, open your storefront in preview mode using either method:

Either method sets a preview cookie in your browser only, so the widget activates for your session while staying hidden from customers. A Rebuy banner appears on the storefront confirming you are in preview mode.

While in preview, confirm the full offer end to end:

To exit preview mode, add ?preview=disable to your store URL (or use the toggle in the Rebuy preview banner). Once the offer behaves correctly, turn Live Mode ON to make it live for all customers.

For more details on using Rebuy Preview Mode see Using Rebuy preview mode.

When your promotion ends, disabling the widget is not enough to stop the discount. To prevent discounts from being cached on carts, set the Shopify Functions Discount to None in the widget's settings once the promotion has ended.

This is necessary because Rebuy's Shopify Functions discounts are attribution-based: if a product line item still carries the Rebuy widget attribution data, the configured discount continues to apply even after the widget is disabled.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor, "Discount" tab, highlighting "Discount Type" set to "None".)

Follow these practices to keep GWP offers performing reliably:

Beyond the Data Source and discount, the widget editor exposes several settings that control gift behavior and display. The settings below are the ones that apply to the Gift With Purchase widget; other widget screens (Language, Tiers, Subscriptions, Layout) are hidden for this widget type because they do not apply.

The Gift Options settings, on the Widget settings screen, control how the gift behaves in the cart. Each option does the following:

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor, "Widget Settings" panel, showing the "GIFT OPTIONS" section highlighted with "Allow Customer to Remove Gift", "Allow Gifts Without Purchase" and "Hide Quantity Selectors in Cart")

The Exclude Items settings, on the Widget settings screen, remove certain item types from the cart calculations that trigger the gift. Enable Gift Cards or Digital Items to exclude those item types from the cart total, line count, and item count used to evaluate your Data Source rules.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor, "Widget Settings" panel, showing the "Exclude Items" section highlighted with "Gift Cards" and "Digital Items" checkboxes)

On the Product settings screen, the only setting that applies to the Gift With Purchase widget is Product Redirect. Set Learn More to Product to let the gift product link to its product page, or to Disabled to remove that link.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor, "Product Settings" tab, with the "GENERAL" section expanded showing "PRODUCT REDIRECT" set to "Learn More" > "Product" or "Disabled".)

The Advanced screen holds tracking toggles and developer options. Enable Attribution Tracking and Enable Product Discovery Tracking add hidden product properties used for performance and engagement metrics — leave these on, or you will lose those metrics. The Advanced screen also holds the manual-install HTML div snippet and per-event JavaScript callbacks for developers.

(Image above: Rebuy Admin "Gift with Purchase" widget editor, "Advanced" panel, showing collapsed "DYNAMIC PLACEMENT" and "CALLBACKS" sections and an expanded "PRODUCT PROPERTIES" section with "Enable Attribution Tracking" and "Enable Product Discovery Tracking" both checked)

Rebuy's Gift With Purchase (GWP) validation logic runs during the Shopify checkout process to keep free gifts honest. A background process called the GWP watcher monitors the cart at checkout, re-evaluates your GWP widget's Data Source rules, and automatically removes any gift that no longer qualifies. This prevents a customer from adding qualifying items to unlock a gift, then removing those items before paying while keeping the gift for free.

When a customer reaches checkout, the GWP watcher re-checks whether the cart still meets the Data Source rules for each active GWP widget, then decides whether to keep or remove the gift:

Removing a gift whose free status was overridden protects the customer from being charged full price for an item they expected to receive for free. Because Shopify does not let customers remove items during checkout, this automatic removal is the only way to prevent that unexpected charge.

For GWP validation to run at checkout, and to run correctly, the following requirements and limitations apply:

When your store uses Shopify Markets with fixed market prices (rather than dynamic currency conversion), the GWP watcher may incorrectly remove gifts at checkout for customers shopping in a non-default currency. This happens because Shopify does not expose currency conversion rates at checkout, so the watcher's threshold calculation uses the wrong value.

Workaround: If your store uses Shopify Markets with fixed pricing across multiple currencies, test your GWP threshold behavior in each currency where you have fixed prices. Consider setting thresholds that account for this discrepancy, or use dynamic (non-fixed) pricing where GWP promotions are active.

A Shopify Plus plan is not required to use the Gift With Purchase widget. You can discount the gift with Shopify Functions directly in the widget's settings on any Shopify plan, and on any plan the widget adds and removes the gift in the cart based on your Data Source rules. Shopify Plus is only required for the GWP validation logic that automatically removes an unqualified gift at the checkout step. Without Shopify Plus, the widget still adds and removes the gift in the cart, but it does not re-check the cart at the checkout step. This matters most when a discount that is not combinable with the gift's discount is applied at checkout: Shopify — not Rebuy — controls discount combination, so the gift's discount can still be stripped there. Without the checkout watcher, though, the gift item itself is not removed, so the customer keeps the gift in their cart and is charged full price for it. Removing the item in that situation is exactly what the Shopify Plus validation logic does. See the GWP Validation at Checkout section for details.

If the repeated "Flashing" you are describing means the gift is added to the cart and then immediately removed again, over and over, so the gift line item flickers or the cart keeps refreshing. This usually happens when the Data Source rule uses "Product Equals" instead of "Products Contains Any." With "Product Equals," adding the gift changes the cart contents and breaks the exact match, so the widget removes the gift — which makes the cart match the rule again and re-adds it, creating a loop. Update the Data Source rule to use "Products Contains Any" to stop the loop.

If your Gift With Purchase widget isn't adding the gift product to the cart, go through these checks:

If the gift is added to the cart but not discounted to $0 and the customer is still charged for it, the gift's discount is not being applied. This is usually one of two things:

When Allow Customer to Remove Gift is enabled and a customer manually removes the gift, Rebuy records that removal with a cookie and will not add the gift back — even if the customer later re-qualifies. Rebuy does this to respect the customer's choice to decline the gift. To keep the gift in the cart whenever the customer qualifies, disable Allow Customer to Remove Gift. If you would rather let customers add the gift back themselves, use a Selectable Gift With Purchase widget instead. See Selectable Gift-With-Purchase Widgets.

This question is about gifts or discounts that persist after you turn the widget off. Disabling a GWP widget stops it from adding the gift to any new carts, but two things can make it look like the offer is still running:

A discount code can trigger a Gift With Purchase (GWP) in Rebuy by pairing a GWP widget with the IF Discount Code Rule. Set the IF rule to Discount Code, choose Equals or Contains, enter the code, and set the RETURN to a Specific Product. When the shopper applies the code in the Smart Cart discount field, the rule fires and the gift is added to the cart. The code must be valid in Shopify independently of the gift, so it cannot be a Buy X Get Y code scoped to the gift product, because that code will not validate until the gift is already in the cart. The rule reads only manually entered codes, and it is not supported on Post Purchase Offer widgets. For the full rule reference, see Discount Codes as a Condition Input for Data Sources.

This applies while a GWP promotion is still active and live — when a customer's cart changes so a discounted product (such as a free gift) no longer qualifies, but the product is not removed from the cart in real time. This is typically caused by not using the Storefront API: the older, deprecated discounting method does not re-validate the cart and remove products when they stop qualifying. Enable the Storefront API for real-time discount validation and automatic cart adjustment. This is a different situation from gifts that linger after you have disabled the widget (see "Why is my GWP widget still providing the free gift after I disabled it?") and from the Shopify Plus checkout removal covered in the GWP Validation at Checkout section.

Using both tools to add a gift for the same promotion is technically possible but can cause conflicts such as duplicate gifts being added to a cart. If you want the Gift With Purchase widget to add the gift while the Tiered Progress Bar shows visual progress toward it, use a decorative tier on the progress bar rather than a functional gift tier. A decorative tier displays the reward milestone without adding its own gift, so the Gift With Purchase widget stays the only thing adding the gift and no duplicates occur. See Using the Decorative Tier in Rebuy's Tiered Progress Bar. Otherwise, choose the one tool that best fits your promotion and disable the other for that promotion.

A Selectable Gift With Purchase widget is not a standard Rebuy widget type — it is a customized Cart Cross-Sell widget, and it requires additional custom code to work correctly. See Selectable Gift-With-Purchase Widgets.

Subscription products are not supported as the GWP gift. Only one-time purchase variants can be returned as the gift, although a subscription product can be used as the qualifying (input) product.

You can automatically add a free gift when a subscription is in the cart by pairing the Gift With Purchase (GWP) widget with a Cart Contains Subscription data source rule. Set the rule's IF condition to Cart, then Contains Subscription, and set RETURN to Specific Product and choose your gift. The GWP widget then adds that gift whenever the cart contains a subscription.

To trigger the gift only for a specific subscription product:

If you add more than one product to a Contains All condition, the rule becomes more restrictive, because every product you list must be in the cart at the same time for the rule to match. Add products to Contains All only when you intend to require all of them together.

(Screenshot above of the Rebuy admin Data Source rule editor, IF Cart and the operator dropdown is set to Contains All, with the specific subscription product selected.)
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A Gift With Purchase widget loops — adding and removing the gift repeatedly — when the gift is the same product as the qualifying product and the Data Source rule uses the Equals operator. Equals compares your rule's products against the cart's products position by position, so it depends on the order items sit in the cart. When the widget adds the gift, that ordering shifts, the rule stops matching, and the widget removes the gift. Removing it restores the original order, the rule matches again, and the gift is re-added. That add-and-remove cycle is the loop.

How to resolve it depends on the offer:

If a gift added by a URL Contains rule disappears on navigation, use an Advanced UTM rule instead. Set up a specific UTM parameter for the campaign — for example a URL Contains rule keyed on utm_source=, utm_medium=, utm_campaign=, or utm_content= — so the gift persists as the customer navigates. See URL/UTM Based Rules.

Essentially, you will need to ensure there is a specific UTM that can be keyed off of for your particular GWP campaign. For example, if you use a URL Contains rule that starts with utm_source= , utm_medium= , utm_campaign=, utm_content= it should work as expected, and the GWP won't disappear when the customer navigates away to a different page on the site.

Rebuy's GWP validation logic can run during the Shopify checkout process to monitor cart conditions and automatically remove gifts if a customer no longer qualifies. This feature is available on Shopify Plus only and requires at least one active checkout widget on the checkout page. For full details, see the GWP Validation at Checkout section above.

Checkout offer (recommendation) widgets include a Treat as Gift With Purchase setting in their Advanced Settings tab. When enabled, the GWP watcher validates that widget's items exactly as it would a standard GWP widget — removing the gift if cart conditions are no longer met. This requires both Enable Attribution Tracking and Enable Widget Tracking to be on — without Widget Tracking, the watcher cannot identify the item and will not validate or remove it — and is available to Shopify Plus merchants. For full setup steps, see Checkout Extensions Installation and Settings.

Rebuy automatically removes a GWP product at checkout when a discount code, an automatic discount, or any other discount that isn't combinable with the gift's discount causes that GWP item to lose its free status — but only when the GWP watcher's own requirements are met. This runs through the same GWP watcher logic described in the GWP Validation at Checkout section, and it has the same requirements: Shopify Plus and at least one active checkout widget.

If those requirements are not met, the GWP watcher does not run, so the gift item itself is not automatically removed — but its discount is still lost, since discount combinability is controlled by your store's discount configuration rather than by the GWP watcher. In that case, the customer keeps the gift item in their cart, but they are charged full price for it.