Shopify catalogs or a sale app?
There are three common ways to put products on sale in Shopify. Each one gets the sale price in front of shoppers. They differ in how much work they take and in what can go wrong when the sale ends.
1. A catalog and price list, by hand
Shopify lets you create a catalog with a price list for a market. In the price list you set a fixed price for each variant, by hand or by uploading a CSV file. Delete the catalog and the sale is over.
The good part: your product prices are never edited. The hard part: it takes many steps for each collection, and you work out every sale price yourself. For one small sale that may be fine. For a sale every month, it adds up.
2. An app that edits your prices
Some sale apps rewrite each product's price at the start of a sale and write every one back at the end. Setup is quick, and many merchants are happy with them.
The risk sits at the end. Every price has to be written back, and every write has to succeed. Merchant reviews of these apps describe prices stuck after a sale or after uninstall, and sales shown as "active" while the store showed wrong prices.
3. An app that builds the catalog for you
Untouched takes the first route and does the steps for you. You pick the products (the whole store, a collection or a tag), a percent or an amount off, and a start and end time. The app creates a catalog with a fixed sale price and compare-at price for every variant, so shoppers see the struck-through price as usual.
Your product price and compare-at price are never edited. At the end time the app deletes the catalog, and your regular prices show again. There is nothing to write back.
The app also checks its own work. It reads the price shoppers see for every variant at the start, every 15 minutes during the sale and at the end, and shows you the result.
Which one fits you
- One small sale, now and then: a catalog by hand does the job.
- Regular sales on many products: an app saves the steps. Ask how it ends a sale, and what happens to your prices if you uninstall it mid-sale.
- You never want to fix prices after a sale: keep the sale out of your product prices, in a catalog.
Limits of the catalog route
- In Untouched, a market with its own currency or its own catalog is left out of the sale, and the app names it.
- If you uninstall during a live sale, the catalog keeps running until you delete it by hand. The app emails the store owner how.
- During the sale your admin shows your regular price, not the sale price. That is expected: the sale lives in the catalog.