Discounting your Shopify products by price and compare at price

Last week we discussed the 3 best ways to discount your Shopify products.

Discounting your products is one of the key ingredients when it comes to running any Shopify sale.

Here are the best 3 ways to discount your Shopify products:

1. Discounting your Shopify products by price and compare at price
2. Using discount codes to discount your Shopify products
3. Discounting your Shopify products using the Script Editor

In this post, we'll dive deeper into the topic of discounting your Shopify products by price and compare at price.

We'll discuss:

• When should you discount your Shopify products by price and compare at price?
• Changing the price and compare at price for multiple products
• Promoting your discounted products within your Shopify store
• What can go wrong when adjusting product prices with timed sales

When should you discount your Shopify products by price and compare at price?

Discounting your Shopify products by price and compare at price is the simplest of the three ways to discount your products within Shopify.

The ability to discount your products by price and compare at price is built-in to Shopify — no additional Shopify apps are required.

This means you can start using this approach right now to discount your products. You just need to change the price and compare at price of any of your Shopify products to apply the discount.

But when should you discount your Shopify products by adjusting the price?

This type of discount is a good option if:

• You are ok with the discount applying to all of your shoppers
• You don't mind changing the price of your products at the start and end of the discount

If this sounds good, then running a sale by discounting your product prices may be a good fit.

Changing the price and compare at price for multiple products

The next question you may have when you start running sales for products by adjusting their price is:

How do I discount multiple Shopify product prices at once?

Discounting products one at a time may not be a big deal if you only have a few items to put on sale. But this can quickly become tedious if you have dozens or hundreds of products to discount.

Thankfully Shopify provides two good options to help you apply discounts to multiple product prices at once:

• The bulk product editor
• Importing product changes via CSV

Changing multiple product prices with the bulk product editor

You can use Shopify's bulk product editor to edit both the price and compare at price. This is a great way to apply a sale price to a group of your products at the same time.

To use the bulk product editor:

1. Visit your Shopify admin Products section

2. Optionally filter your products by searching or applying filters

3. Click on the check boxes next to the products you'd like to put on sale

Then you can click on the Edit products link to be taken to the bulk product editor as seen here:

From here you can edit both the price and compare at price to put these items on sale.

Changing multiple product prices with the product importer

The bulk product editor is probably the easiest option. So if you can make it work for you that'd be my recommendation.

However, if you have a large number of products, or like spreadsheets, you may find it easier to use the Shopify product importer.

To change your product's price and compare at price using the product importer:

1. Visit your Shopify admin Products section

2. Optionally filter your products by searching or applying filters

3. Click Export link (shown above) to get these products as a CSV

4. Edit the prices in your favorite spreadsheet

5. And finally click the Import link (shown above) to apply your changes

Note: If you have other apps that manage your product data (such as Oberlo) you may not be able to use the product importer.

You can read more details about using the product importer over at Shopify's help center.

Promoting your discounted products within your Shopify store

So now that you've got your discounts applied, how to you let your customers know which products are on sale?

For starters, you can put your sale items into a Shopify sale collection to make them easy to find. You can even make this collection update automatically with rules to include any products that have a price less than the compare at price.

Then you'll want to make it clear which items are are sale within your store.

Here are a few popular techniques for promoting your sale items within your Shopify store:

• Use a site-wide sales banner, and optionally a countdown timer, to promote your sale
• Apply product badges or labels to make it clear which products are on sale throughout your site
• Display the discounted sale price clearly by showing the both the original compare at price as well as the discounted price

By making your shoppers aware of your sale items throughout your site, your product sales should be much more successful.

What can go wrong when adjusting product prices with timed sales

Adjusting product prices as part of your sale is a good option since it is built right into Shopify. However, there is one big drawback to this approach —especially when it comes to timed sales.

When your sale starts and ends, the price of every product that is part of sale will need to be adjusted at once.

So if you don't get the timing right, you may end up with a bunch of customer support emails for products that didn't go on sale in time.

A potentially much worse issue is you may end up leaving products on sale far too long (like forever) if you don't change the price back properly after the sale.

If you are using the Shopify bulk editor or product import, in theory the product price updates should happen pretty fast unless you have a really huge number of products to update. But you still need to be present at the start and end of the sale to apply these price discounts.

However, you may run into some trouble if you are using one of the many apps in the Shopify app store that automatically adjust prices for you. In this case, it is far more likely the Shopify discount apps won't be able to update your sale prices all at once. This is due to the way Shopify's API works.

You see, Shopify limits the number of API requests you can run to roughly 2 products per second for most stores. So if you wanted to update 1,000 product prices, that means it would take around 8 minutes before all of them were updated.

This could present a big problem if you are trying to run a sale that starts at a specific time such as a Black Friday sale. If you find yourself in this situation, the best option I'd recommend is to apply your discounts early and do a "soft" launch of your sale.

Summary

Discounting your Shopify products by adjusting the price and compare at price is one of the easiest ways to run sales. And the best part is this is all baked right into the Shopify platform.

You can use the built-in Shopify bulk product editor and Shopify product importer to edit the prices of multiple products at the same time.

When running sales by discounting the price and compare at price, be sure to plan ahead to make sure you have time to apply these price changes both at the start and end of your sale. This is especially true if you are using a Shopify app or the Shopify API to apply your product price changes.