Editing Prices and Compare Prices

Update on January 28, 2021

Good news! Yesterday Shopify reversed its new policy on the Compare Price fields. The compare price no longer needs to be greater than the price. This means you can use the compare price however you want; it can be larger, equal to, or less than the price.

We are leaving the option in the app to edit the price and compare price fields together.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Original Article

In 2021 Shopify will require that the Compare Price field either be larger than the Price field or blank. We made changes on December 21, 2020, to support this, but it might require you to change your workflows.

Changes to the Shopify API for Compare at Prices

Shopify is trying to make it so that the Compare at Price field is just used for sales purposes. An update to Shopify's API will require 3rd party applications to set the Compare Price field to be either blank or larger than the Price field. The product variant will not be modified if this condition isn't met. According to Shopify's documentation:

A product's compare_at_price must always be higher than its price. Adding this validation will enable apps to trust the relationship between these values, allowing them to surface the compare_at_price in new areas (i.e., on a receipt) without worrying about odd values.

For users of our Bulk Editor app, this condition could be triggered either by increasing the Price of a variant or decreasing the Compare Price.

Editing Prices and Compare Prices

We've updated our app to allow you to edit the Price and Compare at Price fields simultaneously. This will make it easier to run sales and ensure that the relationship between both fields is correct.

When you edit either the Price or Compare Price field, you'll see options to set the other field:

If you are editing the Price field, you can make the following changes to the Compare Price field:

Don't modify the compare price. (default)
Set the compare price to the current price of the product. This is the preferred way to run sales with a single edit.
Set the compare price to a fixed amount

Since editing the price might cause validation errors, you'll also need to choose how to handle those. If the edit runs and a product has a Compare Price that isn't either blank or greater than the price, one of two things can happen:

The variant will be skipped
The new Price will be set, and the Compare Price field will be set to blank. Important: this will set the Compare Price to blank even if "Don't modify the compare price" is selected on the left.

We've also updated the preview to make it easier to see how individual variants will be affected by each edit:

Undoing Edits with Price and Compare Price

As before, you can undo an edit to revert the Price or Compare Price back to its previous value. The only exception is if the previous values of the Price and Compare Price fields are not valid.

For example, if we have an existing product with the following prices:

Price: $10
Compare Price: $9

Under the new system, the Compare Price isn't valid because it's less than the price. Then we set the Price to $5. The product now has the following valid values:

Price: $5
Compare Price: $9

If you undo the edit, the app will try to set the Price field back to $10, but it will fail because it would be larger than the Compare Price. In these situations, we recommend going to the Edit History page and clicking on the Export Log button:

This will provide you with a spreadsheet of all the fields you modified. You can filter out the fields you want to revert and modify them with a Spreadsheet Edit.

Editing Prices with a Spreadsheet Edit

You can still edit prices with a spreadsheet, but it introduces the possibility that you could set the Price to an invalid value. For example, if you have a product with a Compare Price of $20, you could have a spreadsheet that sets the Price to $15, which would be invalid.

To help this, we've added an option to set the Compare Price to blank if the Price isn't valid.

To set Compare Price to blank if the Price isn't valid:

Upload a spreadsheet
Click on Advanced Options
Click the checkbox to Set Compare Price to blank if not greater than price

We understand these changes might require changing how you manage prices in Shopify. If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know at support@ablestar.co.