Setting up your cart for a hype sale lets customers load up their cart with products ahead of time, then automatically unlocks your offer — like a gift with purchase — the moment your sale starts, so they can check out immediately without having to re-shop.
🧠 Pro Tip: If you want customers to still be able to buy at full price during the hype period (rather than locking everyone out), Option 2 (two carts) is the better fit — it only shows the sale offer to people who have the secret link.
🛠️ How to Set It Up
There are three ways to run this, depending on how you want to manage access during the hype period.
Option 1: One cart — show and hide blocks
In your live cart, hide your Gift with Purchase (or Add to Unlock) block and save. Customers can add items to cart as normal, with no offer showing.
When your sale begins, go back into the cart and unhide the block, then save.
Customers who already have items in their cart will now see the gift or offer applied automatically when they reopen their cart.
Option 2: Two carts — a BAU cart and a secret hype cart
Keep your normal BAU (business as usual) cart live for the hype period.
Create a second, secret cart with your sale offer included (e.g. gift with purchase).
Turn on Restrict Cart to URL Access Only on the secret cart, and share the direct link with the customers you want to have early access.
On the secret cart, turn on Hide Checkout Button and set up a Checkout Countdown Banner showing when checkout opens (your sale start date).
Customers using the link can load their cart and see their gift, but can’t check out until the countdown ends.
When your sale starts, go back into the secret cart: turn the checkout button back on and remove the countdown banner, then save. Customers can now return and complete checkout with everything already loaded.
Optional: to make the secret cart available to everyone once the sale is live, uncheck Restrict Cart to URL Access Only and turn off your BAU cart. You’ll want to do this manually rather than relying on scheduling, so the sale cart doesn’t open to everyone before you intend it to.
Option 3: Two carts — scheduled switch
Set up a BAU cart (no offer) and a separate sale cart (with your offer) using the same products.
Tell customers to load up their cart on the BAU cart ahead of the sale.
Use Cart Block Scheduling to schedule the BAU cart to turn off and the sale cart to turn on at your sale start time.
Before your sale, go to Cart Settings and make sure Clear Cart Products on Cart Change is unchecked — this ensures customers’ cart contents carry over when the carts switch, rather than clearing out.
If you have any questions setting this up for your sale, reach out to support — happy to help make sure everything runs smoothly.
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