How to Add Sale Price on Shopify for Higher Revenue

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Understanding Sale Prices and Compare-at Prices
3. How to Add Sale Price on Shopify: Single Product Method
4. Bulk Editing Sale Prices for Scale
5. Automating Sales with Collections
6. Strategic Timing: When Should You Run a Sale?
7. Diversifying Revenue: The Digital Advantage
8. The Power of Native Shopify Integration
9. Building Recurring Revenue and LTV
10. Transparency and Predictable Costs
11. Best Practices for High-Converting Sales
12. The All-in-One Ecosystem
13. Setting Realistic Expectations
14. Navigating Technical Challenges
15. Conclusion
16. FAQ

Introduction

Did you know that over 60% of online shoppers report that a discount or a sale price is the deciding factor in whether they hit the "Buy Now" button? In a digital marketplace where attention is the most valuable currency, the visual cue of a crossed-out original price—known as the "Compare-at" price—serves as a psychological trigger that signals immediate value. For many Shopify store owners, pricing is not just a static number; it is a dynamic tool used to clear inventory, introduce new product lines, or reward loyal community members. However, many merchants struggle with the technical execution of these price changes or, more importantly, fail to use them strategically to build long-term brand equity.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a masterclass on how to add sale price on Shopify. We will move beyond the basic "how-to" and explore the strategic nuances of pricing that distinguish high-growth stores from stagnant ones. We will cover the manual and bulk methods for updating prices, how to automate sale collections, and how to integrate digital products to diversify your revenue streams. At Tevello, our mission is to turn any Shopify store into a digital learning powerhouse, and understanding the core mechanics of Shopify's pricing system is the first step toward that transformation.

By mastering your pricing strategy, you aren't just cutting margins; you are intentionally engineering a customer journey that increases Lifetime Value (LTV) and builds recurring revenue stability.

Understanding Sale Prices and Compare-at Prices

Before we dive into the "how," we must understand the "what." In the Shopify ecosystem, there are two primary fields that dictate how a sale is displayed to your customers: the Price and the Compare-at price.

The Price field is what the customer actually pays at checkout. This is the current, active price of the item. The Compare-at price is the original price you want to display as being "crossed out." For the "Sale" badge to appear on your storefront and for the price to show as discounted, the Compare-at price must be higher than the Price.

This setup utilizes the psychological principle of "anchoring." When a customer sees a $100 price tag crossed out next to a $70 price tag, their brain "anchors" to the $100 value. They perceive the product as being worth $100, making the $70 price point feel like a $30 gain rather than a $70 expense. If you simply change the price to $70 without setting a Compare-at price, you lose that psychological leverage.

How to Add Sale Price on Shopify: Single Product Method

For merchants with a smaller catalog or those running a targeted promotion on a flagship item, the manual method is the most straightforward approach.

1. Navigate to Products: Log in to your Shopify admin panel and click on the "Products" tab on the left-hand sidebar.
2. Select Your Product: Click the name of the product you wish to put on sale.
3. Locate the Pricing Section: Scroll down until you see the "Pricing" card.
4. Enter the Sale Price: In the "Price" field, enter the new, lower amount you want to charge.
5. Enter the Original Price: In the "Compare-at price" field, enter the original price of the product.
6. Save: Click "Save" at the top or bottom of the page.

If your product has variants (such as different sizes or colors), you will need to click into the "Variants" section and edit the pricing for each specific variant. This allows you to run sales on specific sizes that might be overstocked while keeping the price of popular sizes at the base rate.

Bulk Editing Sale Prices for Scale

As your business grows, editing products one by one becomes a bottleneck. Efficiency is key to maintaining a competitive edge. Shopify’s bulk editor is a powerful, spreadsheet-like tool that allows you to update hundreds of prices simultaneously.

To use the bulk editor for sales:

1. Select Products: In the "Products" section of your admin, use the checkboxes to select all the items you want to include in the sale.
2. Open Bulk Editor: Click the "Bulk edit" button that appears in the floating menu.
3. Add Columns: If you don't see the "Price" or "Compare-at price" columns, click on "Columns" in the top right and check those boxes.
4. Edit in Mass: You can now click through the cells and update prices rapidly. You can even use keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste values down a column.
5. Save Changes: Ensure you click "Save" to push these changes live to your storefront.

This method is essential for major events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, where you might be discounting an entire collection at once.

Automating Sales with Collections

One of the most effective ways to manage a sale is by using Shopify’s "Automated Collections." Instead of manually adding products to a "Sale" page, you can set a rule that automatically pulls in any product with a Compare-at price.

To set this up:

1. Go to Products > Collections.
2. Click Create collection.
3. Enter a title like "Current Deals" or "Clearance."
4. Choose Automated as the collection type.
5. Under Conditions, select "Compare-at price" is "greater than" "$0".
6. Save the collection.

Now, whenever you add a Compare-at price to any product in your store, it will automatically appear in this collection. This keeps your store organized and ensures customers can always find your best deals in one central location.

Strategic Timing: When Should You Run a Sale?

Running a sale "just because" can occasionally work, but the most successful Shopify merchants align their pricing changes with specific business objectives.

Seasonal Transitions

In the world of physical goods, seasonal transitions are the most common reason for a sale. If you sell winter coats, running a sale in late February helps clear warehouse space for spring inventory. This reduces your holding costs and provides liquid capital to invest in new products.

New Product Launches

Counterintuitively, some of the most successful sales happen at the launch of a product. An "Introductory Price" creates immediate momentum and encourages early adopters to take a chance on a new item. This initial surge in sales can boost your product's ranking in Shopify search results and generate the social proof (reviews) needed for long-term success.

Recovering Abandoned Carts

If a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn't finish the purchase, they are often just one small incentive away from converting. Sending an automated email with a 5% or 10% discount on that specific item can be the nudge they need. This strategy focuses on recovering revenue that was otherwise lost, significantly improving your store's conversion rate.

Diversifying Revenue: The Digital Advantage

While physical product sales are excellent for moving inventory, they are always limited by your cost of goods sold (COGS) and shipping logistics. This is where many forward-thinking Shopify merchants are expanding their business model. By adding digital products, such as online courses or memberships, you can offer high-value items with near-zero marginal costs.

Consider a merchant who sells premium coffee beans. They can certainly put their beans on sale, but their profit margin is capped by the cost of the beans, the packaging, and the shipping. However, if that merchant creates a "Mastering the Home Espresso" video course, they can sell it alongside their beans.

Because there is no physical inventory for the course, the merchant has much more flexibility with pricing. They can offer the course as a high-margin upsell or even bundle it for "free" with a premium espresso machine purchase to increase the total order value. At Tevello, we believe merchants should own their customer data and brand experience, which is why we've focused on keeping customers at home on the brand website rather than sending them to a separate platform for their digital content.

When you integrate digital products, you create a unified login that reduces customer support friction, as the customer uses the same Shopify account to access their physical orders and their digital courses.

The Power of Native Shopify Integration

A common mistake merchants make when expanding into digital products or complex sales is using third-party platforms that redirect the customer away from their Shopify URL. This "fragmented" experience often leads to lower conversion rates and customer confusion.

Our "Native Shopify Integration" ensures that the checkout experience remains consistent. Whether a customer is buying a discounted t-shirt or a full-priced membership, they stay within the Shopify checkout ecosystem they already trust. This is vital for maintaining high conversion rates during a sale. If unifying your stack is a priority, start by a simple, all-in-one price for unlimited courses.

We have seen this approach work wonders for diverse brands. For example, look at how one brand sold $112K+ by bundling courses. By combining the physical craft with digital instruction, they maximized their revenue per customer far beyond what physical products alone could achieve. This is a prime example of strategies for selling over 4,000 digital courses natively while maintaining a seamless brand identity.

Building Recurring Revenue and LTV

While a one-time sale on a physical product is great for a quick cash injection, the true goal of any e-commerce business should be recurring revenue and increasing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Sales can be used as a "hook" to bring people into a membership or a subscription model.

For instance, you might offer a "First Month for $1" sale on a community membership. This low barrier to entry allows the customer to experience the value of your community, making them much more likely to stay at the full price in subsequent months. This strategy is about building brand loyalty and recurring revenue stability rather than just chasing the next transaction.

Successful brands often see driving 50% of sales from repeat course purchasers. By offering a sale to existing customers, you are rewarding their loyalty and keeping your brand top-of-mind. This approach of generating over €243,000 by upselling existing customers demonstrates that the most profitable "sale" you can run is often the one targeted at people who have already bought from you.

Transparency and Predictable Costs

As you scale your store and your sales events, the last thing you want is for your software costs to eat into your newly generated profits. Many apps in the Shopify ecosystem charge "success fees" or take a percentage of every sale you make. We believe that is fundamentally unfair to the merchant. Your success should be yours to keep.

At Tevello, we reject complicated tier structures and hidden fees. We offer The Unlimited Plan for $29.99 per month. This is a flat-rate plan that supports unlimited members and unlimited courses. Whether you have 10 students or 10,000, and whether you sell $100 or $100,000 during your big sale, your cost remains the same. This provides you with predictable pricing without hidden transaction fees, allowing you to calculate your margins with total accuracy.

When you use a solution with 0% transaction fees, every dollar you save on the sale price of your product stays in your pocket or can be reinvested into your marketing efforts.

Best Practices for High-Converting Sales

Once you have mastered the technical aspect of how to add sale price on Shopify, you need to focus on the presentation. A sale that no one knows about is a sale that won't convert.

Use Visual Urgency

A simple price change is often not enough. Use countdown timers on your product pages or a prominent announcement bar at the top of your site. This creates a "Fear Of Missing Out" (FOMO) that encourages customers to act now rather than "thinking about it" and potentially forgetting.

Highlight the Savings

Make sure your theme is configured to show the percentage saved. Seeing "Save 30%" is often more impactful than just seeing the dollar amount, especially for lower-priced items. Many Shopify themes do this automatically, but it's worth seeing how the app natively integrates with Shopify to ensure your digital products also reflect these savings clearly.

Targeted Email Marketing

Don't just blast your entire list. Segment your audience. Send a "VIP Early Access" email to your best customers 24 hours before the sale goes public. This rewards your loyal fans and ensures you have a strong start to your promotion.

Optimize for Mobile

The majority of Shopify traffic now comes from mobile devices. Ensure your "Sale" badges and price displays don't clutter the mobile screen or push the "Add to Cart" button too far down the page. A clean, accessible mobile experience is critical for converting impulse buyers during a sale.

The All-in-One Ecosystem

The modern e-commerce merchant is no longer just a "shopkeeper." They are an educator, a community leader, and a brand builder. By keeping your physical products, digital courses, and community engagement in one place, you create a "learning powerhouse" that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

When you install Tevello from the Shopify App Store today, you are gaining access to all the key features for courses and communities without needing to learn a new platform. You can offer drip content scheduling, interactive quizzes, and social feeds all within your existing Shopify store.

Imagine a fitness brand that sells yoga mats. They can add a sale price to their mats to attract new customers. Then, they can offer a "30-Day Yoga Challenge" course as a digital product. During the sale, they might bundle the mat and the course together for a special price. This not only moves physical inventory but also gets the customer into their digital ecosystem, where they can build a long-term relationship with the brand.

Setting Realistic Expectations

While adding a sale price is a powerful lever, it is important to frame it as part of a robust, long-term business strategy. We don't believe in "get rich quick" schemes. Instead, we focus on the tools that help you amplify your existing efforts.

Sales are a tool for:

• Diversifying Revenue: Adding digital products ensures you aren't reliant solely on physical supply chains.
• Increasing LTV: Using discounts to move customers from a single purchase to a membership or a higher-value course.
• Stability: Creating recurring revenue streams that aren't subject to the same peaks and valleys as physical retail.

By using the Unlimited Plan, you get unlimited video hosting and bandwidth, meaning you don't have to worry about your costs spiking if your course suddenly goes viral during a promotion. This stability allows you to focus on what you do best: creating great content and products for your customers.

Navigating Technical Challenges

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, technical hurdles appear. Perhaps your theme isn't displaying the Compare-at price correctly, or you're having trouble with bulk editing variants.

In these moments, it's vital to have a platform that prioritizes customer data ownership and simplicity. Because Tevello is built natively for Shopify, it uses the data structures already present in your store. This reduces the "technical debt" and the number of plugins you need to keep track of.

If you are migrating from another platform because you're tired of fragmented logins and high fees, you'll find that keeping everything on your own URL simplifies your life and your customers' lives. You can build your entire curriculum and set your pricing strategy during your 14-day free trial, allowing you to see the results before you commit to a monthly plan.

Conclusion

Mastering how to add sale price on Shopify is a fundamental skill for any e-commerce entrepreneur. Whether you are manually updating a single product or using bulk tools to manage a store-wide event, the goal is always the same: to provide value to your customer while driving growth for your business. By combining the psychological power of anchoring with strategic timing and the high-margin potential of digital products, you can transform your Shopify store into a diverse and resilient revenue engine.

At Tevello, we are committed to helping you on this journey. Our mission is to provide you with a seamless, native ecosystem where your digital and physical products live side-by-side. We believe in transparency, which is why we offer a simple $29.99/month Unlimited Plan with 0% transaction fees—you keep 100% of what you earn, always.

Are you ready to turn your store into a digital learning powerhouse and start increasing your Customer Lifetime Value today? You can build your entire course and community structure for free during your trial period. To build your community without leaving Shopify, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from.

FAQ

How do I make the "Sale" badge appear on my Shopify products?

To make the "Sale" badge appear, you must ensure that the "Compare-at price" is set to a higher value than the "Price" field. Most Shopify themes are designed to automatically detect this difference and display a badge or a "Sale" tag on the product image in your collection and product pages. If the badge does not appear, check your theme settings under "Product Grid" or "Product Pages" to ensure the feature is enabled.

Can I schedule a sale to start and end automatically on Shopify?

Standard Shopify allows you to set sale prices manually, but for automated scheduling (e.g., starting at midnight on Friday and ending at midnight on Monday), you typically need to use a specialized app or Shopify's "Launchpad" tool if you are on a Shopify Plus plan. Alternatively, you can use Shopify's "Discounts" section to create a discount code or an automatic discount that has a specific start and end time, although this may not always display the crossed-out "Compare-at" price on the product page itself.

Does Tevello charge a fee for every course I sell during a sale?

No. Unlike many other platforms that take a "success fee" or a percentage of your revenue (sometimes up to 10%), Tevello believes that you should keep 100% of your earnings. We charge 0% transaction fees. Our Unlimited Plan is a flat $29.99 per month, regardless of how many sales you make or how many students you enroll.

Will my digital courses be affected if I change the price of a physical product?

No, your digital courses and physical products are managed as separate entities within your Shopify admin, though they can be linked through bundling. Changing the sale price of a physical item like a t-shirt or a yoga mat will not affect the pricing or access of your Tevello courses unless you have specifically set up an automation or a bundle that connects the two. This independence allows you to run targeted sales on specific parts of your catalog without disrupting your entire store.