Discount Entitlements not falling back to "All Products" after Collection deletion via GraphQL API

GraphQL Admin API Troubleshooting
1

Description: I am reporting a discrepancy in how Shopify handles Discount entitlements when a scoped collection is deleted.

Observed Behavior: In previous iterations of the Shopify platform deleting a collection associated with a discount would often result in the discount defaulting to a “Global” state (All Products), to signify store-wide application discount.

Currently, when using the GraphQL Discount API (discountCodeBasicCreate), if a collection assigned to a discount is deleted:

  1. The discount remains active but becomes invalid for all products.

  2. The customerGets.items object remains typed to the deleted collection ID rather than falling back to all: true.

  3. This creates a “broken” discount state where the merchant believes a sale is active, but no products qualify at checkout.

Impact: This causes significant confusion for merchants using my app. When they delete a collection, they expect the “Specific Collection” restriction to be lifted, not for the discount to stop working entirely for the rest of the store.

Request: Can you confirm if this change from “implicit fallback” to “explicit null entitlement” is the intended permanent behavior for the GraphQL implementation? If so, are there plans to provide a “fallback” flag in the API to prevent orphaned discounts?

2

Hi @Ben_Ashkenazi,

I can confirm that what you’re experiencing is expected behaviour at this time, and I can also confirm that this is the same behaviour on fully admin created discounts, with no API involvement in the discount creation or collection deletion, experiencing the same behaviour, as well as “product specific” discounts experiencing the same behaviour when all the listed products are deleted as well.

I’m happy to submit some feedback on your behalf that you’d like to see an option to specify the fallback behaviour if the discount entitlements are deleted without the discount being updated or deleted itself. While we can’t guarantee when or if this change would happen, I can assure you that our developers and product managers do take all of our partner and merchant feedback with great value when determining future updates and changes.

In the meantime, I may recommend subscribing to the collections/delete webhook (webhook reference), to get notified when collections are deleted on the store, you can then check if they affect any of your app discounts and update them automatically via API calls.