An unauthorized code, quietly discounting 136 orders.
Caught before the next cycle
Every use of the phantom code
Source found, code killed
It lived in a third-party app
The problem.
A discount code, [REDACTED]__[REDACTED], kept applying to influencer kits. It wasn't in Shopify's native Discounts, it wasn't in Flow, and it wasn't in Scripts. The team couldn't find it, couldn't turn it off, and couldn't tell how much it had already cost. Every order it touched was an unplanned markdown, and no one knew if there were others like it.
The approach.
I traced the code through the raw order export and matched it against every discount surface the store had. The tell was the double underscore, the signature of a programmatically applied discount. It wasn't coming from Shopify at all; it was generated and applied through the Collabs influencer app. Collabs showed 136 uses. The order export showed exactly 136 discounted orders. Same number: source confirmed, no ambiguity.
The outcome.
We killed the code at the source and documented how to spot the pattern, so the team can now search for other off-platform discounts before they compound. A few thousand dollars of unplanned discounting stopped, and a real blind spot in the discount stack closed for good.
If codes are showing up in your orders that aren't in your store settings, that's a data trail, and I can follow it. One slot open for Q3 2026.