Disco slips an advertiser-funded cash-back offer into…

Pre-Purchase, launched Thursday, pays merchants about $3.50 per eligible checkout and claims a 3%-plus conversion lift — with the reward funded entirely by the advertiser.

Disco, the New York commerce media platform, launched Pre-Purchase on Thursday, a native Shopify checkout extension that drops an advertiser-funded cash-back offer, up to $30 on the order already in the cart, directly into the final step of checkout. The merchant doesn’t discount, doesn’t fund the reward, and still earns roughly $3.50 per eligible checkout. Disco claims a 3%-plus conversion lift.

The structural move here’s that an ad unit has pushed past the funnel and into the moment of final economic commitment. Checkout has historically been treated as sacred ground, a page you don’t touch because every added pixel is a conversion risk. Pre-Purchase inverts that logic. The pitch is that the ad pays the shopper to complete, which is why the merchant is supposed to tolerate the intrusion.

“checkout is where the economics of a transaction become final, so even small changes to the experience have to earn their place,” said Conner Sherline, Disco’s CEO. That line is doing more work than it looks like. It’s a pre-emptive defense against the entire class of Shopify-merchant objections to monetizing the one page everyone agreed not to monetize.

Rakuten is the current advertiser. Opted-in shoppers create a free Rakuten account at checkout, subject to the offer’s terms. Disco says the format is CCPA compliant, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and uses no third-party cookies or fingerprinting. Install is a drag-and-drop block, no developer required, and merchants can run it behind a holdout against their own traffic. Shopify Plus is required for now. Onboarding is direct; self-serve is in development.

Two numbers worth sitting with. Disco’s headline figure is 3%-plus conversion lift. Yahoo Finance’s subhead on the same release cites roughly 5% from pilot data, with no sample size, duration, or merchant mix published, and Disco hasn’t reconciled the two. Agile Brand Guide modeled the vendor’s own numbers: 20,000 eligible monthly checkouts at $3.50 produces about $70,000 a month in media revenue before any conversion effect.

Michael Saba, President and Founder of ALT. Fragrances, called it “extra revenue from a transaction that was already happening.” The reputational asymmetry sits underneath that sentence: the merchant books the $3.50 immediately, while the cash-back claim runs on the advertiser’s terms, and any shopper who doesn’t receive the reward blames the store they bought from.

Pre-Purchase lands into a live argument over who controls the Shopify checkout experience, running parallel to Walmart opening its checkout to AI agents and the recent Amazon, Yelp and Delta blocking buyer agents while Shopify stayed open. The checkout page is becoming contested distribution real estate. Disco is simply the first to charge rent on it.

Disco slips an advertiser-funded cash-back offer into Shopify checkout

Sources