Gift limits: per-product & total caps

A free gift is only "free" to you up to a point. Without caps, nothing stops a shopper from adding ten of your 100%-off samples to a single order. The limit system in a Gift with Purchase offer gives you two independent controls — a Product Limit per gift and a Total Limit across the offer — so a qualifying cart can claim the gifts you intended and no more. This page documents exactly what each limit does, how they interact, what happens at the edges, and the recipes for the most common caps.

Why limits matter

Every gift you discount comes out of your margin, and every gift you give away comes out of your inventory. The risk is highest on 100%-off gifts, where each extra unit a shopper claims is pure cost to you. Limits are the guardrail:

• Margin protection — a 100%-off gift with no cap lets a single order claim unlimited free units. A limit ties the giveaway to the quantity you budgeted for.
• Inventory protection — gifts come from real stock. Limits stop one order from draining the gift product before the rest of your campaign audience can claim it.
• Abuse prevention — limits are the primary defense for tiered and unlisted-gift setups, where a savvy shopper might otherwise stack multiple free items by mixing products or manually editing cart quantities.

The two controls work at different levels. Product Limit caps a single gift product; Total Limit caps the whole offer. You almost always want both.

Product Limit

The Product Limit is the Limit field on each row of the Offer Products table. It sets the maximum quantity of that one gift product a shopper can add to the cart from this offer.

A few specifics that matter:

• It's stored per row. If a gift has multiple variants you've offered (for example Small and Large), each variant carries its own Product Limit.
• A new row starts at 1 until you change it, so by default each gift is "one per order."
• The value must be 1 or higher. A blank or 0 limit is invalid and blocks saving (see Edge cases).

Behavior when the limit is reached

On the storefront the Product Limit is the add-to-cart quantity for that gift: when a shopper claims the gift from the offer, it's added at the limit you set, and the widget won't add more of that gift than the limit allows. The limit is the ceiling the offer hands out — a shopper can't use the offer button to pile up extra units beyond it.

Total Limit

The Total Limit caps the offer as a whole. It is a diversity limit: it controls how many different gift products a shopper can claim from the offer, no matter how the Product Limits add up. Think of it as "pick any N gifts." The in-app tooltip describes it as "Limit the number of different products you can add to a shopping cart."

The Total Limit and Product Limit answer different questions:

• Product Limit = "how many of this gift?"
• Total Limit = "how many different gifts in total?"

Worked example: Product Limit vs Total Limit

Suppose a Gift with Purchase offer holds three gift products — a candle, a tote, and a mug — and you set:

• Product Limit = 2 on each of the three.
• Total Limit = 2 for the offer.

Then a qualifying shopper can:

• Take up to 2 candles, or 2 totes, or 2 mugs (Product Limit), but
• Only ever claim 2 of the three distinct products (Total Limit). Once they've added two different gifts — say a candle and a tote — the offer stops them adding the mug, even though the mug is still part of the offer.

So the most they can leave with is 2 candles + 2 totes (4 items, 2 products) — never a unit of all three. Drop the Total Limit to 1 and it becomes "pick exactly one kind of gift, up to 2 of it."

How limits interact with tiers and multiple offers

Limits are configured and enforced per offer, not per campaign. A Gift with Purchase campaign can hold several offers — typically one per tier — and each offer carries its own Product Limits and its own Total Limit.

This matters when a shopper qualifies for more than one tier at once. Because each offer's limits are evaluated independently, a shopper who has unlocked a $25 tier and a $75 tier can claim the gifts from both offers — each capped by that offer's own Total Limit. The campaign does not impose a single combined cap across tiers.

For the mechanics of building tiers and how each one qualifies and un-qualifies as the cart changes, see Tiered gifts. For setting up the offers themselves, see Managing multiple offers.

Limits and discounts: what happens past the cap

A natural question for a discounted gift: can a shopper claim an extra discounted unit past the limit? The answer is no for both limits, but the two stop the shopper in different ways.

• At the Product Limit — the offer hands out the gift only up to the limited quantity. The widget won't add more than the Product Limit of that gift, so there's no over-limit unit to discount in the first place.
• At the Total Limit — once the shopper has claimed the maximum number of distinct gifts, the add buttons for the remaining gifts are blocked. They can't add another different gift to pick up an extra discount.

The net effect is that the gift discount only ever applies within the limits you set: a shopper can never use the offer to claim more discounted gifts — or a wider variety of them — than you intended. For how the gift discount itself attaches, see Applying discounts to offer products.

Edge cases

Validation errors when saving

Two save-time errors come straight from the limit fields:

Recipes

Troubleshooting

• Shoppers can claim fewer gifts than my Total Limit allows — the effective limit is capped by how many offered gifts are actually in stock. Check whether any gift products are out of stock or unavailable; the limit shrinks to match real availability.
• A shopper can't add another gift from the offer — that's the cap working. The offer blocks adds once a gift hits its Product Limit or the cart hits the Total Limit (the maximum number of distinct gifts). Raise the relevant limit if you want to allow more.
• My limit change isn't taking effect — the offer data is cached in the shopper's browser for up to about 2–3 minutes. Wait a couple of minutes or start a fresh session, then re-test.
• The campaign won't save with a "diversity limit" or "product quantity" error — a limit is set to 0 or blank. Set every Product Limit and the Total Limit to 1 or higher.

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