Flash sales and scheduled pricing

A sale that requires somebody to be awake at midnight to start it, and awake again on Monday to end it, is a sale that will one day run for a fortnight.

How it works

• A pricing window has a start and an end, both set in advance.
• Prices revert automatically when the window closes.
• Because it is a pricing rule rather than a manual edit, the original price is never lost.

The failure this prevents

Manually discounting a catalogue means manually undiscounting it. The undo is the step that gets forgotten, and the products that stay cheap are the ones nobody checked — usually the long tail, where the margin was thinnest to begin with.

What it does not do

It does not push the sale price to marketplaces that hold their own pricing, and it will not stop you scheduling a discount below cost. The floor that protects margin lives in repricing rules, which is a different mechanism.