What Is a Trigger Rule? If-Then Offer Logic

The Four Parts of a Trigger Rule

Most trigger rules answer four questions:

When? The event, like 30 seconds on a product page.
Who? Conditions, like new or returning, phone or desktop.
What? The action: a pop-up, an email or a discount.
How often? A limit, like once per visit or a cooldown period.

A trigger event is only the "when" part. The rule is the full sentence: when this happens, for these people, do this, this often.

How AND and OR Change Who Qualifies

Example: A shoe store gets 200 carts a day. Say 50 carts are over $80 and 120 are on a phone. Of those, 30 carts are both.

Over $80 AND on a phone: the rule fires (runs) for 30 carts.
Over $80 OR on a phone: it fires for 140 carts. That's 50 plus 120, minus the 30 that would be counted twice.

Swap one small word and the rule reaches almost five times as many carts.

How Loose or Tight Should a Rule Be?

The rule decides who sees your offer, so it shapes what the offer costs you. Make it too loose and your discount lands with people who were going to buy anyway.

Go the other way and it hardly ever fires. Then the walk-away customers you built it for never see it. If you want the difference between those two groups spelled out, read dedicated buyers vs walk-away customers.

Where Trigger Rules Show Up on Shopify

Shopify Flow, Shopify's automation app, uses the same pattern. A workflow starts with a trigger. It can check conditions, then it runs one or more actions. For example: when an order is created, check if it's over $200, then tag the customer.

Pop-up, email and offer apps all have their own rule settings too. Growth Suite, our app, waits for signals such as time on page and cart activity. It then shows time-limited offers only to visitors less likely to buy, with cooldowns between them. Want to know which shopper signals are worth building rules on? Start with our guide to trigger rules for cart abandonment prevention.

More Conditions Don't Make a Smarter Rule

It's easy to think each new condition makes a rule sharper. Mostly it makes it smaller. Stack five ANDs and it may fire a few times a week. That's too few visitors to judge anything, even with A/B testing.