Directory Before you launch

Before you launch

Updated October 23, 2026

Install Tab Promo, build and preview a campaign on any plan, and decide when to publish it to live checkout.

Tab Promo is a rule-driven checkout promotion engine. Before customers see a single discount, you should be able to express the promotion as a rule, run a Preview against a real test order (and a Storefront sandbox run for the display state), and explain why each line moves the way it does. A small, clean launch is easier to support than a broad rollout that is still changing.

Who this is for

This guide is for the person who owns the first promotion launch, usually a marketing operations lead, B2B account manager, or implementation manager.

It is especially relevant when the store needs more than the native Shopify discount UI can express — multiple parallel campaigns, customer-segment promotions, metafield-driven rules, or B2B tiered pricing across many SKUs.

What each plan can do

Every plan can create campaigns, add rules, run Preview, the Stack Simulator, and the readiness check. Publishing to Shopify depends on the plan:

Free publishes campaigns on the Core segmentation runtime, can roll back, and shows theme offers, for up to 20 promotion orders a month (see The Free plan’s monthly orders).
Starter does the same with unlimited orders.
Pro adds campaigns on the External data runtime (metafield conditions) and the Storefront promotion API.
Growth adds A/B tests and profit reports.

Every plan that can publish can have up to 25 active campaigns at once.

The Free plan’s monthly orders

An order counts toward the Free plan when it uses a Tab Promo discount, automatic or code. The count runs per calendar month in UTC, and a refund doesn’t give an order back.

At 80% of the allowance, the admin shows You’ve used N of 20 free orders this month.
When the 20th order arrives, your promotions stay live for 3 more days, and the banner shows the date they stay live until.
After those 3 days, Tab Promo removes your live promotions from Shopify. Your campaigns and rules are saved, and drafts, Preview, the Stack Simulator, and the readiness check keep working.
When the month renews, publish your campaigns again. Upgrading to a paid plan lets you publish again right away.

The store owner also gets an email when the store nears the limit, reaches it, and when promotions pause.

The mental model has three layers, in this order:

A Campaign carries the discount type, schedule (Active dates), Combinations settings, runtime profile, and rollback boundary. Its active rules can produce a discount, a purchase requirement (quantity validation), or both; purchase requirements are combined per runtime profile.
A Rule lives inside a campaign. It has a condition tree (groups of All, Any, or None) and a single action. A campaign can have up to 50 active rules.
A Runtime profile decides which Shopify Function executes the campaign. There are two: Core segmentation and External data.

Every rule inside a campaign shares its schedule and runtime profile. If you need different schedules or different runtime data, use a separate campaign.

You pick the runtime profile and discount type when you create the campaign. The admin has no setting to change them later: the runtime profile locks once the campaign has rules, and the discount type locks after the first publish.

What a rule can do

A rule is one set of conditions and one action. Only rules with the status Active are previewed and published; new rules start as Draft.

The actions you can choose in the rule editor:

Order percentage discount or Order fixed-amount discount — off the whole order.
Product percentage discount or Product fixed-amount discount — off scoped products, variants, or collections. Product discounts can run as a Flat rate or as Quantity tiers (for example, 5+ units → $5 off each, 10+ → $10 off each), counted for each variant separately, across variants of the same product, or across all eligible items. Up to 10 tiers per action.
Minimum / maximum quantity — minimum, maximum, or multiple-of limits that block checkout. These are purchase requirements, not discounts, and aren’t available in discount-code campaigns; see Purchase quantity rules.
Free shipping — waive shipping for the qualifying order (Core segmentation only).
Buy X get Y — buy N qualifying items, get the cheapest earned reward items at a percentage or fixed amount off.
Free gift — a claimable reward the shopper unlocks and adds explicitly; checkout enforces $0. See Offer a free gift.

The conditions available depend on the runtime profile. Core segmentation reads native Shopify signals: customer tags, order count, lifetime spend, logged-in state, B2B company customer, country, cart currency, cart subtotal, cart total quantity, scoped line totals, and product or collection membership. External data adds customer, product, and variant metafields (and a customer tier metafield) as conditions, but the editor doesn’t offer Customer tag or Contains product on that profile — see Use metafields as discount conditions.

Not every campaign starts from scratch. Create campaign opens a setup picker with a Blank campaign and starter templates (purchase quantity requirements, quantity tiered pricing, B2B wholesale tiers, mix and match, VIP exclusive, second item half price, free gift with purchase). A template creates a draft rule you then edit and set to Active. The VIP exclusive template uses External data, so it needs Pro to publish.

Before you start

Decide whether the first campaign should be an Automatic discount, a Discount code, or Purchase requirements only (blocks checkout without creating a discount)
Decide which runtime profile is needed — pick External data only if the rule depends on a customer, product, or variant metafield
Place a test order in Shopify with a test customer and test product; Preview can only load orders from the last 60 days
Decide who reviews readiness check output before each publish
Confirm the store is on a plan that can publish the campaign before you plan a go-live date, and on Free, that the launch won’t run past 20 promotion orders this month

A simple launch sequence

Use this order for the first release:

Create a campaign (it starts as Not published)
Add one rule with one condition and one action, and set its status to Active
Open More actions → Preview and run it against the test order to confirm the discount math
Click Publish — the readiness check runs on the Publish page and Publish now stays disabled until it passes
Publish now (if the plan can’t publish this campaign, such as an External data campaign below Pro or a Free store whose orders are used up, the button reads View plans instead)
Wait for the campaign status to show Live, then verify the discount and any purchase requirement with a real test cart
Edit the campaign, publish again, and roll back once from Publish history to prove the rollback path

What good looks like

After your first launch, you should be able to answer these questions without checking the database:

Which campaign owns this discount on Shopify?
Which runtime profile is it on, and why?
Which rule fired, and which condition was decisive?
What does the current published version do, and what did the previous version do?
If something looks wrong at checkout, how fast can it be rolled back?

What to avoid

Building five campaigns before the first one has been previewed
Putting unrelated rules in one campaign to “save a slot” — each campaign is a rollback boundary, so keep boundaries meaningful
Skipping the readiness check output because the campaign “looks fine”
Editing a published campaign without checking the publish history first
Treating a passing Preview as proof the campaign is live — nothing reaches checkout until a publish is confirmed