How to run sales on Shopify by editing prices and compare-at prices

In addition to showing a product's price, Shopify lets you display a compare-at price which shows the original, higher, price of a product. This article cover how Shopify handles sale prices and how to edit them through the app.

Before You Start

To perform this task, you need:

1. Ablestar Bulk Product Editor installed on your Shopify store
2. Products on your Shopify store to edit
3. A spreadsheet editing program like Excel or Google Sheets (only required for spreadsheet edits)

How Sales Work on Shopify

Every Shopify variant has two pricing fields: 'Price' and 'Compare-at price'. When you create a simple product and just set the price field, that price will show up on your product pages:

In some cases, you might want to put the product on sale. To do this, you put the product's original price in the 'Compare-at Price' field and the sale price in the 'Price' field. The output will vary slightly depending on your theme, but your product pages will now show the sale on them:

This view, where the Compare-at price has a line through it, is only activated if the Compare-at price is higher than the Price. If the Compare-at price is not higher than the Price, the product will show as being priced normally.

Creating a Sale on Shopify

In order to create a sale using Ablestar Bulk Product editor, you need to do two things:

1. Set the 'Compare-at price' field to the value of the current 'Price' field
2. Change the 'Price' field to reflect the discount

You can do both of these at once with the app using either an in-app edit or a spreadsheet edit. With the in-app edit you can also configure rounding rules without needing a spreadsheet.

How to Use an In-App Edit to Run a Sale

You can run your sale with an in-app edit if you don't want to use a spreadsheet program to set your new prices. Here is how to do it:

Step 1: Find the products you want to edit

1. Open up the app and go to the products page
2. Use the search filters to select the products you want to edit
3. Click the Edit products button in the top-right of the screen

Step 2: Configure a modification to the price field

1. If it's not already selected, choose 'Price' from the 'Field to edit' dropdown
2. Select 'Decrease by percent' in the 'How to edit' dropdown. You can also choose 'Change by fixed amount' if you want to change all prices by a constant amount
3. Enter the amount you want to change the prices by. The preview at the bottom of the page will update to show you what the changes will look like
4. If you want to round your new prices, select an option from the 'Rounding' dropdown
5. Now click on Modifications to compare-at price and choose the Set the compare-at price to the current price option. This will make the current price show as the compare-at price so your theme displays it.

Before proceeding take a look at the live preview shown below on the page. This will show you the prices of your products after they are edited.

Step 3: Add other modifications to your product (optional)

If you want to make other modifications to your edit (for example, adding an 'On-Sale' tag) you can do so by:

1. Click on the + Add modification to the right
2. Choose the field to edit (eg, tags) and configure it

When you add a new modification the preview will update to show the new modifications.

Step 4: Run and manage the edit

When the previews for all your products look you are ready to start the edit.

1. Click the Run edit button at the top of the page. The app will take you to the edit detail page where you can see the progress of your edit
2. (Optional) Rename your edit to make it easier to find by going to More actions → Rename

The edit will process in the background so you can tab and the products will continue to be edited in the background.

Step 5: End the sale by undoing the edit

When the sale is over you can quickly revert your prices by undoing the edit. Undoing an edit will set all the product's fields to their values before you first ran the edit.

1. Open up your edit history by clicking on History in the app's left-hand menu
2. Find the edit you want to undo and click on it. This will take you to the edit detail page
3. At the top of the page click on the Undo button. The app will revert the price, compare-at price and other modified fields to the value they had before the edit.

Alternatively you could create a new edit that sets the price of the products to be equal to their compare-at price. To do this you need to:

1. Open up your edit history by clicking on History in the app's left-hand menu
2. Find the edit you want to undo and click on it. This will take you to the edit detail page
3. At the top of the page select More actions and choose Clone edit. This will open up the products page with the same search filters you used for the original edit
4. Click on Edit products at the top of the page to configure your new edit and configure an edit with the following:
   1. Field to edit: Price
   2. How to edit: Set a percent of Compare-at price field
   3. Percentage: 100
5. After confirming the preview looks good click on Run edit to update your products

How to Use a Spreadsheet Edit to Set up the Sale

In order to use a spreadsheet edit to set up a sale, you need a properly formatted CSV or Excel file with three columns. The first column will be used to identify the products (SKU, barcode, title etc..), and the other two columns are for the 'Price' and 'Compare-at price' fields:

Once you have the spreadsheet updated correctly for the sale, simply upload the spreadsheet into the app to complete the edit.

Scheduling Sales

You can schedule you edits to start and undo at specific times. This way you can have a sale start at midnight without having to stay up late. To do this, just click on the Schedule edit button instead of on the 'Run edit' button.

You can read our article on scheduled edits to learn more.

Additional Resources

In this article, we covered how Shopify manages sale prices and how to start and end sales on your Shopify store. If you would like to learn more, we recommend reading:

• Shopify's documentation on sales pricing
• Our article on undoing (or reverting) edits

Finally, if you have any other questions, please send us an email and we'll help you out!