Schedule a Shopify price change that ends by itself

• On the Promotions page, press New promotion and pick the occasion: Black Friday, a clearance, a price point or a promotion of your own. Each fills in sensible defaults you can change.
• Choose the markets and the products, then the discount: a percentage, an amount off or a price point, with the ending per currency (…,99 in EUR, …,90 in CHF) and the crossed-out price if you want one. Set the start, at least five minutes away, and the end.
• Review what will change and what will not, then create it. It appears on the Promotions page and on the timeline.

The crossed-out price, in a market that sells to an EU or EEA country, is the lowest price of the 30 days before the start, as the European rules on price reductions ask, or none when that lowest is at or below the sale price. Elsewhere, it is the price live just before the start.

You can also plan changes you made on the Prices page: in the review, choose Plan it for later instead of publishing.

Times are in the timezone set in Account, Preferences: your Shopify store's, unless you chose another. Prices start to change within five minutes of the time you set; a sale across a large catalogue takes longer to finish. One start and one end apply to every market in the promotion: for midnight in each country's own time, plan one promotion per market. Up to 100 promotions can wait to start, each up to 365 days ahead.

When a promotion ends, each price goes back to what it was, and a market that followed your base price follows it again instead of being left with a fixed number.

The detail that matters: the app reads the live prices just before the promotion starts. If a price changed between the day you planned the sale and the day it began, the end restores the price that was really live at the start, not the older one from the plan. The email you get at the start tells you how many prices had moved.

• An email when the promotion starts and another when it ends, with the number of prices changed.
• If it fails or only partly applies, it is retried on its own for about two hours and an email says so. Home and the Promotions page offer Retry now, and the next Monday email lists it again.
• A promotion can go through approval first: with approvals turned on, an editor proposes it and an admin approves or rejects it with a comment.

The end still restores the pre-sale price. The email you get at the end tells you how many prices had been edited during the sale, so you can review them if the edit was meant to stay.

While it runs, you can also end it now, or take one product out: its prices come back at once, and the rest of the sale runs to its end.

Two promotions may change the same price if one follows the other, or if one sits wholly inside the other. Plan the second from the Prices page: the New promotion wizard leaves out any price another promotion holds during its dates. Dates that cross are refused, and the message names the other promotion: change the dates, or leave those prices out. The timeline shows every promotion as a bar per market with a line for now.

A promotion that has already started still ends itself on the date you set, and your prices go back to normal. That half was planned while you were subscribed and it is honoured. A promotion that has not started yet will not start.

A promotion that ran appears in History like any publication: every price, before and after, per market, with the person who planned it. Two years of history, exportable as CSV.