Running Sales: 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. You can use our Bulk Product Editor app to set and modify these prices quickly.

This article will cover how Shopify handles sale prices and how to edit them with our app.

In order to follow along, you should have:

The Bulk Product Editor app installed
Products on your Shopify store to edit
A spreadsheet editing program like Excel or Google Sheets (only required for spreadsheet edits)

How Sales Work on Shopify

Products in Shopify have two 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

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

Make sure that the Compare at Price is set to the current Price
Change the Price field to reflect the discount

Both of these are easy to do with our app, and you can accomplish them using either an in-app edit or by doing a spreadsheet edit. You can edit each of these fields individually or both at the same time (saving one of your edits).

Using the In-App Editor to Set up the Sale

To set the Compare at Price to the Price, and then decrease the Price with an in-app edit:

Open the Bulk Product Editor app
Filter for the products you want to edit then select Edit Products

3. Choose the following options for the edit:

Field to Edit: Price
How to Edit: Decrease by percent
Decrease by this percent: 20 (for example, if you want 20% off)
Round to nearest: check this is if you want the prices to all end with the same decimal value, e.g., .99
Modifications to Compare Price: Set the compare price to the current price

It should look something like this:

4. Click Run Edit and the app will start updating the Compare At prices in the background.

Using a Spreadsheet 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 (usually SKU), and the other two columns are for Price and Compare At Price.

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 use the scheduling feature to set sales to start and end at specific times. You can read our article on scheduled edits to learn more.

Ending a Sale

To end a sale, you need to revert the Price field to what it was before. You have two ways of doing this through the app:

Use the undo edit function in the app to revert the price
Create a new edit that sets the Price field to be 100% of the Compare at Price field

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!