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How Gifting Works in Your Shopify Store

Written by Customer Success

How Gifting Works in Your Shopify Store

When you gift product to a creator, LoudCrowd doesn't place the order for them or ship anything itself. It creates a discount in your Shopify store, gives the creator a single-use code, and the creator checks out on your storefront like any other customer. The order lands in your Shopify admin as a normal order — real inventory, real fulfillment, your usual workflow.

Here's exactly what gets created, what it's named, and how to find it.

The flow, end to end

  1. You configure the gift in LoudCrowd — a welcome gift, a monthly gift, a task or milestone reward, or a one-off gift sent to a specific creator. You pick the products or collections the creator can choose from.

  2. LoudCrowd creates one discount in Shopify for that gift, scoped to those products or collections. This happens when you save the gift, not when a creator earns it.

  3. A creator earns the gift and sees it in their Creator Hub.

  4. The creator taps Claim. At that moment LoudCrowd creates a single-use code inside that Shopify discount and shows it to them.

  5. The creator checks out on your store with the code. The order appears in your Shopify admin with the gifted item at $0 and the code visible in the order's Discounts section.

What LoudCrowd creates in your Shopify admin

What

Where it appears

Named

One app discount per gift

Discounts → the discount list, type "App"

LoudCrowd Incentive Reward - <Program Name> (DO NOT EDIT)

One code per creator, per gift

Inside that discount, under its codes

WELCOME-GIFT-JAMIE-4KZQ (see naming below)

A gift card, if you offer gift card rewards

Products → Gift cards

Shopify generates the code; the card's note reads LoudCrowd gift card redemption for <creator email>

Please don't edit or delete these discounts in Shopify — that's what the (DO NOT EDIT) in the name is for. LoudCrowd treats them as write-once: when you change a gift's products in LoudCrowd, it creates a new discount and points the gift at it rather than editing the old one, so codes creators have already claimed keep working. Editing one by hand in Shopify breaks that guarantee.

You may also notice a single long random code (32 characters) on a newly created discount. Shopify requires a code when a discount is created, so that one is a placeholder — no creator ever receives it. The readable codes below are the ones in use.

Code naming

Gift codes are built to be recognizable at a glance in your order and discount reports: a prefix for the kind of gift, the creator's name, and four random characters for uniqueness.

Gift type

Code pattern

Example

Welcome gift

WELCOME-GIFT-<NAME>-<4 chars>

WELCOME-GIFT-JAMIE-4KZQ

Monthly gift

MONTHLY-GIFT-<NAME>-<4 chars>

MONTHLY-GIFT-JAMIE-P2XB

Monthly task reward

MONTHLY-REWARD-<NAME>-<4 chars>

MONTHLY-REWARD-JAMIE-7TQD

Milestone reward

MILESTONE-REWARD-<NAME>-<4 chars>

MILESTONE-REWARD-JAMIE-B9WM

Campaign gift, or a one-off gift you send directly

GIFT-<NAME>-<4 chars>

GIFT-JAMIE-M3KF

<NAME> comes from the creator's email address — the part before the @, uppercased, with punctuation stripped and capped at 10 characters.

Two other reward types look different, and it's worth knowing why:

  • Percentage-off discount rewards (a creator's personal 20%-off, not a free product) get a random 8-character code like A7K2M9X1. These are one-use codes for the creator, not codes they share with their audience.

  • Affiliate codes — the shareable code a creator gives their audience — are a separate system. Those are built from the creator's name or social handle (JAMIER, JAMIESTYLE) and can carry a prefix you set in your program's discount settings, like LC-. They aren't gift codes and they don't follow the patterns above.

Finding gift orders in Shopify

Currently, LoudCrowd's order tagging — the LoudCrowd, LoudCrowd-Link, and LoudCrowd-Code tags — applies only to orders LoudCrowd attributes to a creator, meaning sales that creator drove to their audience. A creator redeeming their own gift is a self-purchase, which LoudCrowd deliberately excludes from attribution so it never inflates their commission or your program's revenue numbers. No attribution means no tag.

To find gift orders in Shopify, use the discount instead of the tag:

  • Search the code. In Orders, search the code (WELCOME-GIFT-JAMIE-4KZQ) or paste a prefix like MONTHLY-GIFT into search to find that program's gift redemptions.

  • Open the discount. In Discounts, open LoudCrowd Incentive Reward - <Program> (DO NOT EDIT) to see its usage count and the codes issued under it.

  • Use Shopify's discount reports. Analytics → Reports → Discounts breaks out sales and orders by discount, so a program's gifting volume reads as one line.

  • Check the order itself. Every gift order shows the code in the order's Discounts section, and the line item shows the discount label — Welcome Gift from <Your Brand>, Monthly Gift from <Your Brand>, or Reward from <Your Brand> for task and milestone gifts.

If you'd like gift orders tagged too, mention it to your CSM — it's a product request we're tracking, not something you can switch on today.

What the code actually does at checkout

The gift discount is precise on purpose, so a gift can't turn into an unintended shopping spree:

  • It discounts one unit of the highest-priced eligible item in the cart, to $0. Add two of the same item and the creator pays for the second.

  • It only applies to the products or collections you scoped to that gift. A cart with nothing eligible in it gets no discount.

  • Shipping is free only when the cart is exactly one eligible item. Add anything else and your normal shipping rates apply to the whole order.

  • Each code is single use, and once per customer. A creator can't reuse their own code, and a code that leaks can't be redeemed a second time.

Guardrails worth knowing

  • LoudCrowd never modifies your existing discounts, products, customers, or orders. Gifting only creates new discounts and new codes.

  • Codes are created one at a time, on claim — not in bulk in advance. Your discount list grows by one discount per gift you configure, not per creator.

  • Gift codes don't expire on their own. If you change a gift's products, already-claimed codes stay valid against the old configuration.

  • Gifting requires the Discounts permission on the LoudCrowd Shopify app (view, create, and delete), and gift card rewards also require the Gift cards permission. See Shopify App Permissions.


FAQ

Does LoudCrowd place the order or ship the product?

No. The creator places the order themselves on your storefront, and it flows through your normal fulfillment process. Inventory decrements like any other sale.

Will a gift order show up as creator-driven revenue in LoudCrowd?

No. Self-purchases are excluded from attribution, so a gift redemption earns no commission and doesn't count toward the creator's sales stats or your program's attributed revenue.

What does the creator see at checkout?

The discount is labeled with the gift type and your brand name — Welcome Gift from <Your Brand>, Monthly Gift from <Your Brand>, or Reward from <Your Brand>. When free shipping applies, the shipping line reads Free Shipping - <that same label>.

Can we use our own codes instead of LoudCrowd-generated ones?

Yes, for discount rewards. You can upload a pool of your own codes in LoudCrowd and hand those out as rewards instead — useful when your codes need to match an existing naming convention or a code set from another system. Product gifts use LoudCrowd-generated codes.

Someone on our team deleted one of the LoudCrowd discounts. What happens?

Codes under it stop working at checkout, and creators holding those codes will see them fail. Let your CSM know — the fix is to re-save the gift in LoudCrowd, which creates a fresh discount, and re-issue codes to affected creators.

Where can I see which creators have claimed a gift?

Today the clearest view is in Shopify: open the gift's discount to see every code issued under it — each code carries the creator's name — along with how many have been used. Since codes are only created at the moment a creator claims, the code list is the claim list. If you need this as a report inside LoudCrowd, ask your CSM.

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