How to implement MAP (Minimum Advertisable Price) - Lower price in cart than on product page

[xyz2157]

I am working on a store that resells products from multiple brands. Some of these suppliers have a MAP (minimum advertised price) policy in place. This means that resellers cannot show a price below this minimum advertised price anywhere on the website until the product has been added to cart.

I was planning to use Shopify automatic discounts to handle this, by using the MAP as the "Sale Price" and then adding an automatic discount to reduce the price shown in cart. 

However:

• We need one discount per product that has an MAP, because the exact difference between MAP and actual cart price is unique per product. Shopify has a limit of 25 automated discounts.
• As if that wasn't enough, it's not possible to bulk-update automated discounts using an import or export app. Discount that require discount codes can be updated using an import or export app.

Anyone have experience implementing a Shopify store in an MAP situation? Any advice or suggestions?

[PaulNewton]

ONLY for the online sales channel, or headless can you customize things to partially hide price displays even then data may leak through the ajax api.

Hi @xyz2157 👋 Preventing access to prices is all workarounds built on workarounds.

Shopify is not built for this, almost as an axiom: products always have a price in currency even if $0 and do not accept text in place of that.

That means it's easy to integrate with most sales channels or third party platforms that have requirements of items must have a price.

Consequence is stores cannot choose to not have a price at some point in the process of checkout for an item.

If your already mucking with the sales price on a single product another alternative may be to have a display product with a "standard" price, then at time of cart or checkout swap in the MAP product. But that really only applies to the online-sales channel through advanced theme customizations.

For an advanced workaround for all channels using discounts see cart transforms which has replaced the depreciated shopify-scripts.

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/discounts/build-discount-function?extension=javascript 

or swap 1 line item for another, or go through bundles 🤷‍♂️

Beyond that building a headless storefronts may be a costly requirement.

[xyz2157]

Headless is not an option. Shopify Plus is not an option. It's fine if the lower sales price shows in store since we are just not allowed to ADVERTISE the higher price.

I have already rejected the option of putting the MAP price in a metafield, as we would need to hide the sale price and show MAP on: 

• product pages
• collections
• schema
• Google shopping
• other feeds
• filters

This is why I'm looking at using discounts, since those already have the exact functionality desired of showing a different price in cart and checkout than what is used elsewhere.