# What Is Giveaway Gator?

Giveaway Gator is a Shopify app that lets you run automated sweepstakes and giveaway promotions. Instead of discounting your products, you reward customers with giveaway entries for every purchase they make — driving sales, increasing average order value, and building excitement around your brand.

## The Problem It Solves

Running a giveaway promotion manually is painful. You'd have to track every order, calculate entries, manage bonus periods, and update multipliers — sometimes at 3am when a bonus window opens or closes. Giveaway Gator handles all of this automatically.

## How It Works (The Basics)

1. **You create a promotion** with a start date, end date, and a Dollar Per Entry rate (e.g., $1 spent = 1 entry).
2. **Customers shop normally.** Every time an order is placed, Giveaway Gator automatically calculates how many entries the customer earned.
3. **Entries show up on your store.** Product pages and the thank you page display entry information so customers stay engaged.
4. **You pick a winner.** Export all entries to a CSV when the promotion ends and select your winner.

## What You Can Do With It

**Drive sales without discounting:**
- Award giveaway entries instead of offering percentage-off coupons
- Sell entry multiplier products as virtual add-ons for extra revenue

**Create urgency and excitement:**
- Set up bonus periods where entries are multiplied (e.g., "40X entries this weekend!")
- Display countdown timers and progress bars on your storefront
- Offer spending threshold bonuses ("Spend $100+, earn 50 bonus entries")

**Engage customers across channels:**
- Automatically process orders from Shopify, TikTok Shop, Meta, and other channels
- Let in-store POS customers claim entries from their receipts
- Give customers a self-service page to check their entry totals
- Reward [post-purchase surveys](surveys.md) and [post-purchase actions](post-purchase-actions.md) like social follows and referrals (Unlimited Pro)

**Stay in control:**
- Add manual entries for customer service situations or special promotions
- Set product-specific bonuses to spotlight featured items
- Award order tag bonuses based on Shopify order tags (Unlimited Pro)
- Understand your audience with customer analytics and segments (Unlimited Pro)
- View detailed audit logs showing exactly how every entry was calculated
- Configure bonus discount codes that award extra entries

## Plans & Pricing

Giveaway Gator has two simple plans. Both include unlimited orders and unlimited entries, in-app live chat support, and a 1:1 onboarding session — and both start with a free trial.

### Unlimited — $199/month

Everything you need to run automated giveaways:

- Unlimited promotions, orders, and entries
- Dollar-per-entry, bonus periods, super bonuses, and order bonuses
- Bonus discount codes and order multiplier products
- Storefront blocks: entry tags, countdown timers, progress bars, and the Entry Checker
- Thank-you page and order status entry displays, plus the order confirmation email image
- POS receipt claims, Shopify Flow, and the REST API
- Manual entries, CSV export, and detailed audit logs
- In-app live chat support and a 1:1 onboarding session

### Unlimited Pro — $299/month

Everything in Unlimited, plus the tools to learn about and re-engage your customers:

- **Customer analytics** — cohort and segment insights on your Customers page
- **[Post-purchase surveys](surveys.md)** — collect feedback and reward entries
- **[Post-purchase actions](post-purchase-actions.md)** — reward social follows, referrals, and custom actions
- **Checkout Bonus** — show entries inside checkout and reward fast checkouts (requires your store to be on Shopify Plus, since checkout extensions are a Shopify Plus feature)
- **Product restricted promotions** — limit a promotion to specific products
- **Order tag bonuses** — award entries based on Shopify order tags

> Want to change plans? Go to **Giveaway Gator > Settings** and pick a plan. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.