How to run a Shopify sale without changing your prices
The usual way to run a sale is to lower the price on every product, then raise it again when the sale ends. That works until one price doesn't go back. There is another way: leave your prices alone and put the sale somewhere else.
Where the sale prices go
Shopify has a feature called a catalog. A catalog holds a price list, and a price list can set a fixed price for any variant. Shoppers in the markets the catalog covers see those prices instead of your regular ones.
A fixed price comes with its own compare-at price, so shoppers still see the struck-through "was" price next to the sale price. The sale looks the same on your store. The difference is where the numbers live.
What stays the same
Your product price and compare-at price are never touched. Open any product in your admin during the sale and you see the price you set. That can look odd at first, because the admin shows the regular price while shoppers see the sale price. It means the sale is working as designed.
How the sale ends
You end the sale by deleting the catalog. Shoppers see your regular prices again within a minute. Nothing has to be written back, because nothing on your products was changed in the first place.
This matters most on big catalogs. If a sale covers thousands of variants, ending it is still one delete, not thousands of price edits that each have to succeed.
Doing it by hand
You can build a catalog and price list yourself in the Shopify admin, by hand or with a CSV file. It works, but it takes many steps for a single collection, and you have to work out each sale price and compare-at price yourself.
What Untouched does for you
Untouched builds the catalog 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 works out a fixed sale price and compare-at price for every variant and puts them in a new catalog.
- At the start, every 15 minutes during the sale and at the end, the app reads the price shoppers actually see for every variant and shows you the result.
- At the end time it deletes the catalog.
What to know before you start
- A market with its own currency or its own catalog is left out of the sale, and the app tells you which one.
- If you uninstall the app during a live sale, the catalog keeps running until you delete it by hand. The app emails the store owner how to do that. Better still, end your sales before you uninstall.