Shopify Rollouts Now Schedule and Test Prices by Market

Shopify Rollouts Now Schedule and Test Prices by Market

Released on 23 October 2026, a Shopify update adds catalog changes to Rollouts, so merchants can schedule the prices and product availability a market sees for a set date and time, or test one catalog against another on the online store. Read the Shopify Changelog release note here.

Rollouts arrived in June to schedule and A/B test themes and checkout configurations from Markets > Rollouts in the Shopify admin, as covered in our guide to scheduling and testing themes with Shopify Rollouts. Discounts joined in early October, when Shopify Rollouts started scheduling and testing discounts. Catalogs are the third addition, and for a store selling into more than one country they matter most, because a catalog decides which products a market's customers can buy and at what price.

Black Friday falls on 27 November this year and Cyber Monday on 30 November, and a UK store selling to EU or US customers through separate markets can now set each market's sale prices up in advance and have them switch on and off on schedule.

The catch sits in Shopify's own Help Center. Price tests, and any rollout that reaches less than all of a store's visitors, change prices on the online store only. Google Shopping, Meta and other product feeds do not receive the rollout, so a store and its ads can show different prices at the same time.

How it works

Shopify's Help Center defines a catalog as "a set of products with optional custom pricing that you assign to a market." A catalog change in a rollout does one thing: it sets a catalog to Active, which publishes its prices and product availability, or to Draft, which withdraws it. One rollout can carry several catalog changes, so a merchant can switch one catalog off and another on at the same moment.

The catalog has to exist first, and only catalogs created for markets can be added. B2B catalogs assigned directly to a company location cannot, nor can archived ones. A catalog can sit in only one unended rollout at a time, and its change is not shown to anyone until it is assigned to at least one market. Rollouts are available on the Basic plan or higher.

There are three types of rollout. A Launch merges its changes permanently at the scheduled time, and Shopify warns that they cannot be reverted once the rollout ends. An Event publishes its changes for a set period, then rolls them back. An Experiment compares a treatment against a control, with a default 50/50 split and a default end date 90 days after it starts, and needs the Grow plan or higher. Start and end times follow the store's time zone in Settings > General.

The most important detail is what a rollout does not do. It changes a catalog's status only, so it does not copy the catalog when it starts. Edits to a catalog's prices and products save straight away and apply whenever it is active. When a rollout is paused, or an Event ends, the store returns to the catalogs' current prices, not to the prices it had when the rollout began.

Reach decides where a change shows up. Shopify's page on audience reach and external channels sets out the rule. A Launch, or an Event at 100% of traffic, reaches all areas, including the online store, ads, listings and feeds. An Event below 100%, or an Experiment at any reach, applies to the online store only. At full reach, a catalog change can also update checkout, headless storefronts such as Hydrogen, Shopify POS and product feeds such as the Google & YouTube feed, though connected channels update on their own schedule.

Visitors are put in a group at random, and a rollout cannot be targeted at a customer segment, a customer tag or a device. The group is saved in an essential cookie, so a returning visitor keeps it until the cookie expires or is cleared. Visitors get a group even without consenting to tracking, but only those who consent are counted in the results.

Examples / Use cases

A Black Friday price list for EU customers. A UK homeware store builds a second EU catalog with its sale prices, leaves it in Draft, and schedules an Event at 100% of traffic that activates it and deactivates the usual catalog from Friday 27 November to the end of Monday 30 November. At full reach the sale prices can reach its Google feed too, and when the Event ends the regular catalog returns. The schedule runs on the store's time zone, so a midnight start in London reaches Paris and Berlin at 1am local time.

A range that launches with a new look. A fashion brand putting a winter range into its US market schedules the US catalog as a Launch alongside a theme update, so the range, its prices and the storefront change go live at the same moment, which is the third use the changelog lists. If the new look means a new theme rather than a settings change, that is the custom theme work our Shopify web design team does.

A price test. A store on the Grow plan wants to know whether its US market converts better at a higher price. It runs an Experiment between its current US catalog and one with higher prices. Shopify's analytics measure the online store, cart and checkout only, and cannot be filtered by device or country. A store with modest US traffic may wait a long time for an answer, and whether a store has the traffic for a meaningful test is one of the checks in the free audit that starts our conversion rate optimisation service.

What this means for UK merchants

The first issue is Google Shopping. Google's Merchant Center help page on mismatched product prices says Googlebot compares the price in a merchant's product data with the price on the landing page, that a product with a mismatch may be disapproved, and that mismatches may lead to an account suspension. One common cause it lists is a price shown to users that differs from the price crawled by bots. A price Experiment, or an Event below 100%, opens exactly that gap: the feed keeps the regular price while some visitors see another. Shopify does not say which version a crawler is shown, and its own page warns that Google and Meta can delist products or suspend an account for mismatched offers.

Shopify's ways to reduce the risk are to set traffic allocation to 100%, pause ads for the affected products, remove them from listing channels for the duration, review feed rules and product URLs, and monitor channel status while the rollout runs. Price testing suits products a store does not advertise, or markets with no Shopping campaigns. Feed disapprovals are one of the first things we audit on Shopping and Performance Max accounts through our Google Ads for Shopify service, but it is cheaper not to cause one.

Meta needs the same check. Since September, products have been shared with Meta by default through Shopify Catalog, as we covered when Shopify added Meta as an AI channel, switched on by default. A store that thinks it has no external listings may have more than it realises.

The second issue is UK consumer law, which matters most around Black Friday. The CMA's 2023 open letter on urgency and price reduction claims online was written for online retailers and, among others, "businesses that help clients to build online stores". It asks that claims are reviewed for compliance before A/B testing takes place, that search engine ads continue to reflect current offers accurately, and that special offer prices do not continue beyond the promotion's end date. It also says the higher price in a price reduction claim must be a genuine and realistic selling price. The letter predates the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, but the CMA's current guidance on unfair commercial practices says the new provisions maintain much of the scope and effect of the previous law.

Rollouts helps with part of that. An Event that rolls back on schedule is a dependable way to end a sale price when the banner says it ends. The A/B testing point cuts the other way: a price shown to half of a store's visitors is still a price shown to consumers, so the claims in a test need checking before it starts. A rollout cannot make a "was" price genuine either. Take independent legal advice on anything unusual.

Practical considerations

Build sale prices in a separate catalog, not in the live one. Because a rollout only changes status, an edit to the regular catalog during an Event stays in place after it ends, and pausing does not undo it. A separate Draft catalog leaves the regular prices untouched underneath.

Allow for the lag at the end. Shopify says POS and product feeds return to current prices on their next sync, and until then they can still display the published prices. At the end of a Black Friday Event, Shopping ads can show the sale price for a while after the store has reverted, which runs into the CMA's points about search ads and end dates. Pausing the affected ads before the Event ends is safer than relying on the sync.

Watch organic search too. Shopify notes that organic results do not go through feed review, but availability changes, URL changes and page errors can still affect indexed pages. Keep product URLs stable, avoid temporary errors on indexed products, and use a full-reach rollout for an important availability change.

Check permissions before the busy weeks. Staff on a store role need the Markets > Rollouts permission plus the Catalogs View and Create and edit permissions, which require View products, and the plan's limit on active B2B catalogs still applies. The View as feature on the Products page shows a rollout's prices only once it is active at 100%, so it cannot show what an Experiment's treatment group sees.

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