End-to-end strikethrough pricing on Shopify: a winning strategy

End-to-end strikethrough pricing on Shopify: a winning strategy

You are a Shopify e-merchant, and for the upcoming sales period, you want to display crossed-out prices across your entire site: collection pages, product pages, cart page, and checkout page.

Why display crossed-out prices?

The crossed-out price is a powerful marketing technique that involves displaying a product's original price crossed out alongside a reduced price, highlighting the savings for the customer. It is used to:

• Enhance the perception of value: By showing an explicit discount, customers perceive a higher value for the product and feel like they are getting a great deal

• Create a sense of urgency: Visible discounts encourage immediate purchases before the price returns to its original level

• Increase the average cart value: This can motivate customers to add more items to their cart, thereby boosting sales volume

• Improve the user experience: Displaying crossed-out prices consistently prevents confusion and uncertainty that might discourage purchases

• Maintain site credibility: End-to-end promotion displays strengthen customer trust in the site's reliability and facilitate purchase decisions

The limitations of displaying crossed-out prices on Shopify

Shopify provides tools to manage promotions, but these tools show their limitations when it comes to making crossed-out prices visible across the entire site:

Automatic discounts: These allow you to efficiently create discounts for a collection of products. However, crossed-out prices only appear in the cart and at checkout, preventing visitors from identifying discounted products before adding them to the cart.

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Compare-at price: By setting a compare-at price and a new price for each product, crossed-out prices are displayed on catalog and product pages. However, only the new price is visible in the cart and at checkout.

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Shopify's native methods

To approach the possibility of displaying crossed-out prices across the entire site, several methods are available:

1. Create automatic discounts and custom meta fields

By combining automatic discounts with product updates using a custom meta field and modifying the Liquid code for collection and product pages:

Pros:

• Crossed-out prices are displayed consistently across catalog, product, cart, and checkout pages.

Cons:

• Requires technical skills and significant development time.

• Time-consuming to update product metafields.

• Risk of inconsistencies: Every product involved in the discounts must be updated and the changes reverted at the end of the promotion.

2. Updating compare-at prices via import

To save time compared to manually editing promotional prices, this method involves bulk-exporting a collection to Excel, modifying the "Compare at Price" and "New Price" columns using a formula (e.g., =Variant Price - (Variant Price * % Discount)), and then re-importing the CSV into Shopify:

Pros:

• Crossed-out prices are displayed on catalog and product pages, and the process is much faster than manual updates.

Cons:

• The issue of combining discounts remains unresolved.

3. Customizing the cart

Another approach is to create automatic discounts and customize the Shopify theme by modifying the Liquid code to display crossed-out prices on the cart page:

Pros:

• Crossed-out prices are visible on catalog, product, and cart pages.

Cons:

• Crossed-out prices are not visible on the checkout page.

• Modifying Liquid code requires development skills.

4. Adding a global announcement banner

You could also consider adding an announcement banner at the top of the site to inform visitors about ongoing discounts on catalog and product pages:

Pros:

• Simple to set up.

• Allows visitors to be informed about promotions while browsing catalog and product pages.

Cons:

• Less impactful, as visitors don’t see crossed-out prices directly on products.

• Visitors must add each product to the cart to see the exact discount amount.

Shopify documentation

Given the lack of a satisfactory solution, let's review Shopify's documentation on the subject:

"Compare-at prices and discounts are managed differently on Shopify. If a sale price and a compare-at-price are set, both these amounts can be displayed on product pages and collection pages, but only the sale price is displayed at checkout.To display crossed-out prices everywhere, a third-party app or custom solution is required."

The adopted solution: Sales Genius

To address this issue, you can integrate Sales Genius, a third-party tool that ensures an optimal user experience by displaying crossed-out prices across the entire site.

Key features

• End-to-end display of crossed-out prices: By creating or bulk-importing discounts through the app, crossed-out prices are automatically displayed throughout the customer journey (homepage, catalog, product pages, cart, and checkout)

• Time savings: With start and end dates for discounts, product prices are automatically updated without manual intervention

• Precise targeting: You can hide crossed-out prices for specific segments or markets, easily adjusting discounts to reach your desired audience

• Additional features: Includes options like free gifts, buy X get Y, magic links, and more

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Results achieved

After integrating Sales Genius, merchants have seen positive results during key periods such as Black Friday. They reported a decrease in cart abandonment, thanks to better consistency in displaying discounts, which contributed to an increase in their conversion rate, estimated to be between 7 and 10% higher compared to the previous year during the same period.

Additionally, the average order value increased by 10 to 12%, a change that can be attributed to the visibility of crossed-out prices from the homepage throughout the customer journey, encouraging visitors to add more items to their cart while being aware of the discount.

Conclusion on crossed-out prices with Sales Genius

If you want to implement crossed-out prices across your online store, install the app and get a free integration with your theme!

Try Sales Genius for free now, or contact us if you have any questions.