Most spin-to-win wheels ship with six slices of the same idea: 10% off, 15% off, 20% off, maybe a 50% jackpot. That’s one lever pulled six times. Percentage-off discounts scale with the size of the cart, costing you the most on exactly the orders where you’d most like to keep your margin. Profiter builds six different prize types for a reason — percentage off, fixed amount off, free shipping, free gift, buy X get Y, and a genuine no-win slice. The cheapest way to make a shopper feel like they won depends on your margins, your average order value (AOV), and what’s sitting in your warehouse. In fact, AOV is such a key factor that our own recommendation engine uses a hard threshold of $100 to decide between percentage and fixed-amount prizes.

Percentage off: still right for order-wide incentives

Percentage off is the classic order-wide incentive. It’s the clearest “spend more, save more” signal a wheel can send — 20% off feels the same whether the cart is $30 or $300. This makes it a good fit for stores with an average order value under $100, where a fixed amount might feel too small. But on a high-AOV store, a generous percentage jackpot can take a real bite out of your biggest orders. This is the core of the “Rule of 100,” a heuristic Profiter’s own recommendation engine uses: if your AOV is consistently over $100, a percentage-off prize is often a riskier choice than a fixed amount.

Fixed amount off: the lever for raising average order value

A fixed amount off — $5, $10, whatever you set — with an optional minimum spend costs you the same dollar figure regardless of cart size. This protects your margin on large orders, making it the safer choice for high-AOV stores. If your AOV is over $100, a $20 discount is a much smaller percentage of the total than it is on a $40 order. You can use this to your advantage: set the minimum spend a little above your current average cart, and a $10-off slice stops being a flat cost and starts being a reason to add one more item before checkout.

Free shipping: margin protection for low-AOV stores

If your average order is modest and shipping is a real line item, a percentage-off slice stacks on top of a cost you’re already absorbing. Free shipping, with an optional max shipping cap, costs you a known number instead — the shipping bill itself, capped if you want a ceiling on it — rather than a discount that grows with the price of what’s in the cart. On a low-margin, low-AOV store, it’s often the cheaper prize to hand out, and shoppers tend to want it just as much as a discount.

Free gift: clear inventory without discounting the cart

A free gift is 100% off one chosen product, not the order. That lets you move something specific — a color that isn’t selling, last season’s line — without touching the price on everything else the shopper is buying. It reads as a real prize to them. To you, it’s the cost of one unit, not a percentage off the whole transaction.

Buy X get Y: built for categories people reorder

BOGO, at whatever discount percent you set, earns its keep in categories where a second unit is genuinely useful — skincare, supplements, snacks, anything a customer goes through and buys again. It adds a unit to the cart instead of shaving the price on the units already there, which is a different piece of math from a straight percentage off, and usually a better one when the product itself is consumable.

No win: the slice that keeps the other five affordable

A wheel with five generous prizes and no real no-win slice isn’t generous, it’s just a discount code with a spin animation. The payout rate shows up in your margin whether shoppers notice the wheel or not. A genuine no-win slice, set at honest odds, makes room for a real jackpot. Profiter’s internal monitoring flags wheels where the no-win slice accounts for less than 20% of outcomes, as this often indicates the blended discount rate is too high to be profitable. A healthy no-win chance is what keeps the other five prize types affordable.

What is a discount combination on Shopify?

Shopify has specific rules for how discounts can be combined at checkout. For example, a customer typically can’t use two different percentage-off codes on the same order.

A spin-to-win wheel from Profiter simplifies this. The wheel itself presents a combination of options, but the shopper only wins one prize per spin. The prize is delivered as a standard, single-use Shopify discount code. This means:

The prize follows Shopify’s rules. If a shopper wins “15% off,” that code will behave like any other 15% off code at your checkout, including its compatibility with other active discounts (like free shipping).
The outcome is guaranteed. Profiter determines the prize on the server before the wheel even starts spinning and mints the code ahead of demand. This prevents shoppers from trying to game the spin and ensures the code is ready instantly.

The “combination” is in the variety of prizes you offer on the wheel, not in stacking multiple codes on a single order.

Setting the mix so it pays for itself

Every slice in Profiter carries its own odds and its own stock or redemption cap. You’re not picking one average discount rate; you’re designing a prize distribution. A jackpot slice that’s rare and capped costs far less over a month than an even split between two mid-size discounts.

But how do you know if the mix is actually profitable? Profiter measures this for you against a holdout control group that never sees the wheel. Visitors are deterministically bucketed using an FNV-1a hash of their visitor and experiment IDs, ensuring they stay in the same group across sessions without server-side state. We then compare the two groups using a two-proportion z-test to see if the wheel is genuinely increasing profit per visitor after accounting for the cost of discounts and shipping.

The same inputs drive a set of automated recommendations that watch for the setup mistakes that cost the most margin. Each rule fires on a specific threshold rather than a hunch.

Rule	Trigger
Rule of 100 (Percentage)	AOV ≤ $100 and the wheel mainly gives fixed amounts.
Rule of 100 (Fixed Amount)	AOV > $100 and the wheel mainly gives percentages.
Jackpot Margin Risk	Jackpot probability ≥ 1.5% and no redemption limit is set.
No-Win Share Too Low	No-win slice probability is < 20%.

Worth saying plainly where those numbers come from: they’re defaults we picked and hard-coded, not thresholds derived from a pool of merchant data. The part that is independently checked is the maths they run on — 46 unit tests cover the measurement and recommendation modules, and the distribution functions behind the significance testing are verified against published reference values rather than assumed correct. Values current as of 28 July 2026.

Set the odds and the caps first, then check what the blended payout works out to before the wheel goes live. If you’d rather start with a proven formula, the Rule of 100 is the fastest way to match your prize types to your AOV.

6 Discount Types You Can Offer Beyond a Flat Percentage Off