How are you handling storewide sales without lots of discount codes

BFCM

Topic summary

Managing storewide sales becomes complex as catalogs grow, with overlapping discount codes, manual price changes, and compare-at prices creating confusion about true base pricing and promotion end dates.

Key recommendations for cleaner sale management:

  • Establish a single source of truth for base pricing—decide whether it lives in regular price or compare-at price and maintain consistency

  • Distinguish temporary campaigns from permanent price changes—short-term sales (like weekend promotions) should be reversible, while long-term adjustments should become the new standard price

  • Plan the rollback strategy before launching—the biggest operational challenge is cleanly reversing promotions, not starting them

  • Maintain consistent customer messaging—discount displays should match across product pages, collection pages, cart, banners, and badges to avoid confusion

For larger catalogs with thousands of SKUs, manually updating prices product-by-product is slow and error-prone. Bulk pricing tools that can update and revert prices based on filters (collections, tags) help streamline this workflow, especially when toggling promotions on and off across many products simultaneously.

Summarized with AI on November 19. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

When a store is small, it is easy to run sales with a couple of discount codes. Once the catalog and traffic grow, a long list of overlapping codes can become hard to manage and hard to explain to support teams and customers.

What I see quite often is a mix of approaches running at the same time. Some prices are changed directly on products, some are handled through compare at prices, and some are still relying on codes from old campaigns. Over time it becomes harder to answer simple questions like what the real base price is or when a promotion actually ends.

The way I usually think about storewide or seasonal sales on Shopify is:

  1. Be clear on the “source of truth” price
    Decide whether the real base price lives in the regular price or in compare at price. Once that is set, try to keep it consistent so that future discounts are applied on top of a clear baseline.

  2. Separate short campaigns from long running price changes
    Short events like a weekend sale are often better handled as temporary adjustments that you can roll back cleanly. Longer term changes that you expect to keep should be written as the new normal price and reflected in your margin planning.

  3. Plan how you will reverse the sale before you start it
    The part that bites teams is often not the start of a promotion but the clean rollback. Having a list of which products and collections are affected and a repeatable way to restore prices saves a lot of time on the other side of the campaign.

  4. Be consistent with how you show savings to customers
    Whether you use compare at price, badges, or messaging in banners, customers should see the same story in collection pages, product pages and the cart. Fragmented messaging can make discounts look random, even if the numbers are correct.

On larger catalogs, doing this product by product inside the admin can be slow, especially when you need to toggle a promotion on and off across thousands of SKUs. In those cases I have used bulk pricing tools to update and then revert prices based on filters like collections or tags. Full disclosure, I help with a tool called Bulk Discounts Price Edits App that focuses on that workflow, but the principles above still apply if you handle everything manually.

I am interested in how other merchants and partners are approaching this. How are you handling storewide or large promotions without ending up with a confusing mix of discount codes and half retired price changes in your catalog?

For anyone who wants to look it up, the app is Bulk Discounts Price Edits App on the Shopify App Store

2

Keep the real price in Price and only use Compare-at for short promos; bulk editor/CSV makes storewide flips and rollbacks clean. Did this on a client build, bulk edits avoid the discount-code mess.