Test Diwali Offers on Shopify with Discounts in Rollouts
Every Diwali, Indian D2C brands guess at their offer: 20% off or buy two get one, free gift or free shipping. Since 2 October 2026, Shopify lets you stop guessing. Discounts can now be part of a Rollout, so you can show a new offer to a share of your visitors, compare it with your current one, and keep the winner. With Diwali on 8 November, there is just enough time to test before the rush. This guide explains how, and what to watch so the result is real.
Feature details are from Shopify's changelog of 2 October 2026 and the Rollouts pages in the Shopify Help Centre. Plan details were checked against Shopify's Rollouts requirements page. Diwali dates are for 2026.
What changed with discounts in Rollouts?
Rollouts is Shopify's built-in tool for scheduling and testing changes to your store. Until now it covered themes, checkout and customer account pages, and catalogs. Shopify's 2 October announcement added discounts, with three uses:
- Schedule discount changes. Launch a new offer to a portion of online store traffic, then expand when you are ready.
- Compare offers. Test discount changes against your existing offers and review conversion results to decide which to keep.
- Launch changes together. Schedule a discount to go live alongside theme and checkout changes in a single rollout, for example a Diwali banner, a festive theme section and the offer itself, all at the same moment.
Shopify notes that a discount's existing customer eligibility rules still apply, and that ordinary discount start and end dates still work for standalone promotions.
Which Shopify plans can test discounts?
According to Shopify's Rollouts requirements page, "Rollouts are available on the Basic plan or higher" and "Experiments are available to stores on the Grow plan or higher." In practice:
| Plan | What you can do with Diwali offers |
|---|---|
| Basic | Schedule offers to switch on and off on time, as launches or temporary events. No side-by-side experiments. |
| Grow, Advanced, Plus | Everything above, plus experiments that split traffic between your current offer and a new one |
Shopify's default for a new experiment is a 50% control and 50% treatment split, with an end date 90 days after it starts, and both can be changed. Experiments, and any rollout that reaches less than 100% of visitors, apply only to the online store. We explained the wider Rollouts tool in our guide to Rollouts and theme testing.
What Diwali offers are worth testing?
Test offers that are genuinely different, so the result tells you something. Testing 15% off against 16% off wastes the time you have. Useful pairs for Indian D2C stores:
- Percentage off versus a gift. 15% off the order against a free product above a threshold. Gifts often protect margin better than discounts, if buyers value them.
- Percentage off versus buy more, save more. A flat discount against tiered offers such as 5% off two items and 10% off three, which raise order value.
- Free shipping threshold. Your current threshold against a higher one paired with a small gift.
- Prepaid incentive. An extra discount for paying online against no prepaid incentive, which matters for cash on delivery and RTO costs. Our guide to reducing COD and RTO on Shopify explains why.
Pick one pair. Two simultaneous tests on the same visitors make both results hard to trust.
Photo: Unlisted Sightings via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
What if your store is on the Basic plan?
You cannot run a side-by-side experiment, but you can still use Rollouts well for Diwali. Scheduled launches and temporary events work on Basic, which solves the most common festive mistake: an offer that starts late, ends late, or is switched off by hand at midnight by someone who forgot. Set the Diwali offer up as an event with a start and an end, alongside any festive banner or theme change, and let it run itself.
If you want evidence on which offer works better without experiments, the honest fallback is a sequential comparison: run one offer for a week, the other for the next week, and compare. It is weaker than a true split, because the weeks differ in traffic and mood, so treat the result as a hint rather than proof. Annotate both weeks in Shopify Analytics so the context stays with the numbers.
Why launch the offer together with theme changes?
Because a festive offer that nobody notices does not get tested fairly. The changelog's third use, launching a discount alongside theme and checkout changes in one rollout, matters for this. A Diwali offer usually needs a homepage banner, a message on product pages and sometimes a note at checkout. If those go live at different times, early visitors see an offer with no explanation, or a banner for an offer that is not yet active.
Bundling them in one rollout means everything switches on together and, for an event, switches off together. If you are testing, the treatment group sees the full festive experience and the control group sees your normal store, which gives a cleaner comparison than a discount on its own.
When should you run the test before Diwali?
Now, in October, not during the peak. Diwali falls on Sunday 8 November 2026, with Dhanteras on 6 November. Shoppers can behave differently in the final days before a festival, so a test run during the peak tells you about the peak and little else. Run it in the weeks before, when traffic is steady, then launch the winner for the festive period.
A workable timeline:
- This week. Choose the pair of offers and the one measure that decides the winner.
- Next two to three weeks. Run the experiment through at least one full weekly cycle, longer if your store has modest traffic.
- Late October. Read the result against real orders, then schedule the winning offer as a launch or event timed for the Diwali week.
- Diwali week. Let the scheduled rollout switch the offer on and off on time, alongside any festive theme changes.
How do you read the result honestly?
Rollouts reports conversion results, but the offer with the higher conversion rate is not always the better offer. A bigger discount will often convert more people and still make less money. Before you start, decide what winning means:
- Conversion rate if the aim is new customers at any reasonable cost.
- Revenue per visitor if the aim is total sales.
- Margin after discount, shipping and returns if the aim is profit, which is usually the right aim for Diwali.
For the last two, pull the order data for the test period and compare each group yourself. Also remember that Shopify changed how sessions are measured on 21 September 2026, so do not compare this test's conversion rates with tests from before that date. We covered that in our article on the session measurement update.
One more new tool helps here. Since 1 October, Shopify Analytics lets you add annotations to time-series reports. Annotate the start and end of your test, and your Diwali launch, so the context is still there when you look back in January.
How much traffic does a discount test need?
More than most small stores expect, and there is no single safe number. The fewer orders you get each day, the longer a test needs to run before a difference means anything, and the bigger the difference has to be before you can trust it. A store with a few orders a day can test two very different offers and see a clear winner. It cannot reliably tell 10% off from 12% off before Diwali.
If your traffic is modest, test bolder differences, run for longer, and judge on the measure you chose at the start. If the result is close, treat it as a tie and pick the offer that protects your margin.
What can go wrong with discount tests?
- Discounts stacking. A test offer that combines with an existing automatic discount can give away more than intended. Check combination settings on every discount involved.
- Offers leaking. If influencers or WhatsApp broadcasts share a code meant for one group, the split breaks. Prefer automatic discounts for tests over shareable codes.
- Marketplace mismatch. A test offer on your website that undercuts or contradicts your Amazon or Nykaa price will confuse buyers who compare.
- Stopping early. A strong first two days is not a result. Wait for the full period you planned.
Want help setting up a Diwali offer test?
Free Diwali test plan. Get in touch or email hello@exactwhy.com with the subject "Diwali offer test", your store URL, your Shopify plan and the offers you are considering. We reply within 4 hours with which pair to test, how to set it up in Rollouts, and how to judge the result on margin, not just conversion.
Going further. We also build festive landing pages and theme sections, and schedule them with the offer in a single rollout, so everything goes live together. Our Diwali readiness guide covers the rest of the season.