Shopify Rollouts Catalog Changes: Schedule Festive Prices, Post-Diwali Reverts and Honest Price Tests

Shopify Rollouts catalog changes, added on 23 October, let you schedule and test product prices and availability. How it works, the plan limits, the catches, and how to use it for festive and clearance pricing.

Shopify Rollouts catalog changes arrived on 23 October, and for an Indian store this is well timed: in the next three weeks, most stores will change prices for Diwali, change them back, and then start clearing stock. According to Shopify's changelog, Rollouts can now activate, deactivate or switch between catalogs at a set date and time, run experiments between catalogs on the online store, and launch catalog changes together with theme and checkout updates in a single rollout. In plain terms, you can prepare festive prices and availability in advance and have them go live, and come off, on schedule.

This post explains what the feature does, using Shopify's Help Center pages for Rollouts and Markets catalogs, the conditions in the small print that change how you would use it, and a worked plan for the Diwali-to-clearance weeks. We also cover what it does not do, because a scheduled price change is only half of a festive change; the other half is what shoppers see first.

What Shopify Rollouts catalog changes add

Rollouts is Shopify's tool for scheduling a set of changes to your online store. Until last week it covered your main theme, checkout and accounts pages, and, since 2 October, discounts. Catalogs are now on that list. You manage rollouts from Markets > Rollouts in the admin.

A catalog, in Shopify's Markets terms, is a set of products with optional custom pricing that you assign to a market. It controls which products customers in that market can buy and at what price. By default, every product is available in every market at your store's default prices. A catalog lets you change that: include or exclude products, apply a percentage price adjustment to the whole catalog, or set fixed prices and compare-at prices for individual products. You create one under Markets > Catalogs.

The new piece is timing. Shopify's rollout types page says a catalog change sets a catalog to Active or Draft as part of a rollout. Setting it to Active publishes its prices and product availability; setting it to Draft withdraws them. A rollout can include more than one catalog change, so you can activate a festive catalog and draft the everyday one at the same moment.

Launch, Event or Experiment

Every rollout is one of three types, according to the Help Center:

• Launch, the default, merges your changes into the store permanently, for all eligible visitors in the markets and traffic share you choose.
• Event publishes changes for a set period, then rolls them back. It requires an end date. This is the type for a festive price window.
• Experiment tests a treatment against a control for a share of visitors. By default it splits traffic 50% control and 50% treatment and ends 90 days after it starts; both can be changed before saving.

Plan limits, from Shopify's requirements and considerations page: rollouts are available on the Basic plan or higher, and experiments need the Grow plan or higher. Staff without full access need the Markets > Rollouts permission, and for catalogs, View plus Create and edit, plus View products, to add or edit a catalog change.

Seven conditions in the small print

The Help Center lists several considerations that change how a careful store would use catalog rollouts. These are the ones we would read twice.

1. 1A full rollout reaches beyond your online store. Shopify says catalog changes can update prices and availability in checkout and cart, headless storefronts, Shopify POS, and Google and YouTube feeds. Good for consistency; risky if you only meant to change the website.
2. 2A partial rollout or an experiment does not. Experiments and rollouts to less than 100% of visitors apply only to the online store, so other channels may show different prices or products. A price test on your site can leave your Merchant Center feed showing the other price.
3. 3Rolling back is not a snapshot. Pausing or rolling back returns those places to the current catalog prices and availability. Edits you made during the rollout remain.
4. 4Price edits are not scheduled. A rollout changes only a catalog's status. Price and product edits to a catalog save immediately and apply whenever that catalog is active. If you edit a catalog that is already live, the edit is live too.
5. 5One catalog, one rollout. A catalog can be part of only one unended rollout at a time, and it must be assigned to at least one market before its change reaches customers. Archived catalogs cannot be added.
6. 6Excluded products show your 404 page. The catalogs page says products not included in a market's catalog cannot be viewed or bought there, and their product pages show your 404 page. Excluding a product is not the same as moving it down.
7. 7Analytics are narrow. Rollout analytics cover the online store, cart and checkout only, count only visitors who consent to tracking, cannot be filtered by device or country, and update a few minutes after each visit.

A worked plan: festive prices that end on their own

Here is how a store might use catalog rollouts for the coming weeks. It is an illustration, not a store we work with, and the dates follow this year's calendar: Dhanteras on 6 November, Diwali on 8 November and Bhai Dooj on 11 November.

1. 1This week, create a festive catalog for your India market, set to Draft. Set fixed festive prices on the products in the promotion, and decide deliberately what each compare-at price should be. If another catalog already applies to the same market, read Shopify's rules on which price wins: where neither catalog is more specific, the catalogs page says the lower price is displayed.
2. 2Create an Event rollout that sets the festive catalog to Active from the start of your sale and back to Draft at the end, for example at 11:59 pm on 11 November so Bhai Dooj buyers see the festive price. The Event's end date does the revert for you.
3. 3Preview the result and check three things: product pages, the cart and your Google feed. Shopify says a full rollout reaches checkout and feeds, so confirm they show what you expect.
4. 4Leave the festive catalog alone while it is live. Remember that edits apply immediately, so a late price change is not scheduled; it happens the moment you save.
5. 5After the Event ends, prepare a separate clearance catalog for slow stock and launch it on a date you choose, as a Launch if the clearance prices are meant to stay until stock runs out.

The benefit is not that this is impossible today. Many stores already change prices with bulk edits or apps. The benefit is that the change, and the revert, are written down in the admin with a time attached, and do not depend on someone being awake at midnight after a long festive day.

Testing prices honestly

The Experiment type makes it easy to show different prices to different visitors. That deserves some care before anyone runs one in India.

• Shoppers compare, and share links. Two friends seeing different prices for the same product on the same day is a support ticket at best and a screenshot on social media at worst.
• India's 30-day prior price rule comes into force on 1 January 2027. It requires an announced price reduction to be shown against the lowest price in the preceding 30 days. A store that tests prices this winter should keep a clear record of what each visitor group was charged, because the prior price you show in January depends on the prices you actually charged in December. Our post of 24 October covers the rule in detail.
• The analytics will not tell you everything. Shopify's analytics page says experiment metrics cannot be filtered by device or country, and that a Launch and an Experiment use slightly different calculations. The page does not describe a statistical significance display, so judge the result on enough orders to mean something.
• Test availability before price. An experiment that changes which products are available in a catalog, such as hiding a low-margin variant, is easier to explain to a customer than one that changes the price they pay.

Our view: use Events and Launches for festive and clearance pricing, where everyone sees the same price at the same time. Reserve price experiments for cases where you can explain the difference, such as a market-specific price, and run them on enough traffic that the answer is worth the risk.

When a discount is the better tool

Catalogs are not the only way to schedule a festive price. Rollouts has handled discounts since 2 October, and for many promotions a discount is simpler. The Help Center's considerations page says a rollout can include up to 250 discounts, that each discount keeps its own active dates, and that a rollout can activate or deactivate them for its audience. A discount can be part of only one unended rollout at a time, and combination settings still apply.

• Use a catalog when the price on the product itself should change, everywhere the product is shown, for a market. Festive prices on a defined range and clearance prices are good fits.
• Use a discount when the offer depends on the cart, such as buy two get one, a threshold offer or a code for a WhatsApp list.
• Avoid stacking both on the same products without checking the arithmetic. A catalog price cut plus an automatic discount can take a product well below the margin you planned.

Reading the results, and the B2B fine print

Shopify's analytics page lists metrics by rollout type. For a theme Launch, it shows gross sales, average order value, orders, total sales over time, sessions over time, conversion rate over time, new versus returning customers and bounce rate. A theme Experiment shows conversion rate over time, bounce rate, reached checkout rate and add-to-cart rate. The page does not list catalog-specific metrics, so for a festive catalog Event we would also keep our own record: units sold and revenue for the promoted range before, during and after the window, from Shopify's standard reports.

Stores that sell wholesale should read two more lines. Activating a catalog cannot take you over your plan's B2B active-catalog limit, although setting another catalog to Draft in the same rollout can offset it if it frees enough market assignments. And catalogs assigned directly to a company location cannot be added to a rollout at all.

Illustration of a full sequence: a festive Event runs from the start of the sale to 11 November; on 12 November a clearance catalog for 40 slow products is launched; on 26 November the store reviews sell-through on that range and decides what to do with what is left. Each step is written in the admin with a date, which is the real value of the feature.

What Rollouts does not do: the order of your collections

Shopify's Rollouts pages describe four kinds of change: the main theme, checkout and accounts, discounts and catalogs. The order of products in a collection is not among them. When your festive catalog goes live at midnight, your collection pages still show products in whatever order they were in before, and when the Event ends, nothing about the collection order reverts.

That matters more than it sounds. A festive price on a product buried on the third row of a collection page sells little. A clearance price on a slow product sells nothing if the page still leads with Diwali gifts. And if a catalog excludes products, shoppers in that market can no longer view them, which can leave a carefully arranged first row with gaps.

The fix is to schedule the order alongside the prices. Decide what each key collection should lead with during the festive window, what it should lead with after Bhai Dooj, and set both changes to happen at the same times as the catalog rollout.

Who can skip catalog rollouts for now

Not every store needs this feature this season. It is worth being honest about where it adds work rather than removing it.

• Stores that rarely change prices. If your festive offer is a single discount code, a discount in Rollouts, or simply a discount with an end date, does the job with less setup than a catalog.
• Stores whose prices move with a daily rate. Many jewellery and bullion stores recalculate prices from the gold or silver rate through an app or a custom integration. A catalog with fixed prices set a week ahead can conflict with that logic. Talk to whoever maintains your pricing integration before you mix the two.
• Stores already stretched in festive weeks. A new tool learned on the busiest days of the year is a risk in itself. If you cannot test a catalog rollout on a quiet weekday before your sale starts, use what you already know for Diwali and try Rollouts on the clearance in mid-November instead.
• Stores with no Markets setup to speak of. If you have never opened Markets > Catalogs, spend ten minutes there first to see which catalogs, if any, already apply to your India market. Creating a new one on top of an existing catalog changes which price wins.

A checklist before your first catalog rollout

• Confirm your plan: Basic or higher for rollouts, Grow or higher for experiments.
• Check which catalogs are assigned to your India market and any other markets under Markets > Catalogs.
• Decide compare-at prices product by product, and check whether the catalog's percentage adjustment is applied to them.
• Use Event for windows with an end, Launch for permanent changes, and Experiment only with care.
• Remember that a 100% rollout reaches checkout, POS and Google feeds, and a partial one does not.
• Make no edits to a live catalog unless you mean them to apply at once.
• Do not exclude products you will sell again; their pages show your 404 page.
• Schedule the collection order changes to match the catalog changes.

Schedule the shelf as well as the price

SellRank, our Shopify collection-sorting app, covers the part Rollouts leaves out. You can stage a festive collection order as a draft, schedule it to publish on a date and have it revert automatically when the campaign ends, so the order of your shelves changes at the same moments as your catalog prices. Conditions such as in-stock keep sold-out products out of the first rows, sell-through and days of stock cover rankings help build a clearance collection that leads with what most needs to move, and every published order is kept as a version with its own views, add-to-carts, orders and revenue, so you can see whether the festive order beat the everyday one.

Install SellRank free from the Shopify App Store at apps.shopify.com/sellrank-collection-sort, or read more at /products/sellrank. If you are planning festive and clearance pricing and want help lining up the dates, write to us at /contact.