How to Bulk Edit Prices in Shopify — Percentage Discounts, Compare-At & Sales | AssetScope

Running a sale on Shopify means touching every product you want to discount. The native bulk editor lets you set a price, but it cannot apply a percentage reduction, round to £X.99, or set compare-at prices in bulk. Most merchants end up exporting a CSV, running formulas in Excel, and hoping the re-import doesn’t corrupt anything. There is a better way.

How to bulk edit compare-at price in Shopify

The compare-at price is one of the most effective selling tools in Shopify — it displays as a crossed-out figure next to the current price, signalling to shoppers that they’re getting a discount. Most Shopify themes render this automatically whenever the compare-at price is higher than the sale price.

Shopify provides no way to set compare-at prices across multiple products at once. AssetScope’s Bulk Price Editor handles this in a single operation: select your products, set the compare-at price to the current price, apply your sale reduction, and confirm.

How to run a percentage sale on all Shopify products at once

Shopify’s native bulk editor can set an exact price, but it has no concept of a percentage reduction. To apply a 20% discount across 200 products, you would need to calculate each new price individually or export to a spreadsheet.

A percentage-based bulk price editor removes that friction. Select the products you want to discount, choose “Reduce by percentage”, enter 20%, apply rounding to .99, and confirm. AssetScope previews every price change before writing anything to Shopify.

What Shopify’s Native Bulk Price Tool Can and Cannot Do

Shopify’s built-in bulk edit tool does include price fields. You can select multiple products and type a new price into the bulk edit column. What you cannot do is apply a reduction — there is no “reduce all selected prices by 20%” option.

You also cannot set compare-at prices in bulk, which means you cannot show a crossed-out original price alongside a sale price for multiple products simultaneously. And there is no rounding option, so bulk-reducing prices by 25% will produce awkward figures like £18.74 instead of £18.99.

For a store running a seasonal sale across 150 products, these limitations mean the bulk editor is essentially useless for the most common pricing task.

The CSV Method: Why It’s Risky

The most common workaround is the CSV export/import method. Export your products, open the CSV in Excel or Google Sheets, write a formula to apply the discount, manually round figures, save, and re-import.

The risks are real. Shopify’s product CSV has over 40 columns. Import errors — a comma in a product description, a currency symbol in a price field, a truncated row — can corrupt product data across your entire catalogue. And the re-import process can take 20–30 minutes for a large store, during which your product data is in flux.

For routine pricing operations like seasonal sales, a purpose-built tool is dramatically safer and faster.

What a Proper Bulk Price Editor Should Do

A proper Shopify bulk price editor should support: percentage reductions (reduce all selected prices by N%), fixed reductions (reduce by £X), set exact prices, price rounding (round to nearest .99, .95, or whole number), and compare-at price management (set the original price as compare-at, then apply the sale price).

It should also let you filter by vendor, product type, tag, or collection before applying changes — so you can run a vendor-specific sale or discount a single category without touching the rest of your catalogue.

AssetScope’s Bulk Price Editor handles all of these operations directly from your Shopify admin, with a preview of all changes before applying.

Shopify Native vs. CSV vs. AssetScope: A Comparison

The table below compares the three main approaches to bulk price editing in Shopify across the features that matter most for running sales and managing pricing at scale.

Setting Compare-At Prices for a Shopify Sale

Shopify’s compare-at price is how you show a crossed-out original price next to a sale price. When a product has a compare-at price higher than its current price, most Shopify themes display both prices with the compare-at struck through.

Setting this up in bulk requires setting both the compare-at price (the original price) and the sale price for every product simultaneously. This is not possible via Shopify’s native bulk editor — you have to open each product individually.

A bulk price editor that supports compare-at pricing lets you run a properly displayed sale across hundreds of products in a single operation, including clearing the compare-at price when the sale ends.

Here is a worked example of a typical sale setup. You have a product priced at £89.00 and want to apply a 20% discount. The new selling price is £89.00 × 0.80 = £71.20. You round this to £71.99 for psychological pricing. The compare-at price is set to the original £89.00. The customer now sees the original price struck through (£89.00) alongside the sale price (£71.99) — a clear visual signal that the product is discounted.

In AssetScope’s Bulk Price Editor, this entire operation is two steps: first, set compare-at price to current price across all selected products; second, reduce the selling price by 20% with rounding to .99. Both operations run in a single batch, and every change is previewed before it is applied. For 200 products with 3 variants each, this takes under a minute.

How to Remove Compare-At Prices After a Sale Ends

One of the most common follow-up questions after running a Shopify sale is how to clean up compare-at prices once the promotion is over. If compare-at prices are left in place after you restore the original selling prices, customers will see a crossed-out price that is identical to (or lower than) the current price — which looks like a pricing error and undermines trust.

In Shopify’s native admin, removing compare-at prices means opening every product individually, clearing the compare-at field on every variant, and saving. For a sale that covered 200 products with multiple variants, this is hours of manual work. The CSV approach is faster but carries the usual import risks.

AssetScope’s Bulk Price Editor handles this in a single operation: select the products that were part of the sale, choose “Clear compare-at price”, and apply. Every compare-at value is set to blank in one batch, restoring your product pages to their standard non-sale appearance in seconds.

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