Variable discount won’t stay at 0

Winnie — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 08:31:36 GMT

I run a market stall and enter all sales at the end of the day as if they were a single sale. Note that I’m still “trying out” Square and don’t yet receive funds via the square device...that will come if I end up liking the system. So I’m using it to record the day’s takings and item sales/inventory control. I have two issues with discounts:

I often sell a 2nd item for a discounted price, eg 1 for $17and 2 for $30 and I might do that four times in the day...but square will only let me enter the “Discount 2nd item $4” once...so that’s a pest that I can’t find a workaround for, other than having multiple discounts of $4. (Thoughts anyone?)

The other discount problem I have is that the Variable Discount (to enter the discount amount at point of sale) stays at whatever amount I used the first time, ie it doesn’t stay at 0. I’m not sure how to fix that.

I would appreciate any ideas to work around these two problems.

Re: Variable discount won’t stay at 0

Seamus — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 01:24:35 GMT

Hey @Winnie,

Thanks for getting in touch!

Have you tried looking further into automatic discounts? This can allow you to place conditions on discounts applying automatically when a customer purchases a certain amount of items:

You can set up three types of quantity discounts:

Exact Quantity: When you add an exact item quantity to your cart, the discount will automatically trigger and apply to the item cost.
Minimum Purchase Quantity: When you add a minimum quantity of an item to your cart, a discount will apply to all of the specified items.
Buy One, Get One Free: When a customer buys a specified quantity of an item or category, a discount will apply towards additions of the same item or towards different item(s) added to the cart. For example, you can create a BOGO discount so that when a customer purchases 2 hats, they’ll receive 50% off the cost of a scarf.

For the issue you're seeing with variable discounts, I was able to test and received the option to enter a different amount each time I applied the discount. Keep in mind that you can't apply the same variable discount twice to the same transaction.

If you can post some screenshots of the issue I might be able to help with this one further!

thread Variable discount won’t stay at 0 in Payments Troubleshooting

Variable discount won’t stay at 0

Re: Variable discount won’t stay at 0