Schedule a WooCommerce Sale and Revert Prices Automatically

To run a sale for a set period and have prices go back afterward, enter the sale prices in SwiftGrid, choose Schedule changes from the Save menu, set an Apply at time and a Revert at time, and schedule it. This is a SwiftGrid Pro feature. SwiftGrid Pro is not on sale yet. The signup below is how you hear when it is.

Who This Is For

You want a set of products on sale at a chosen time and back to their old prices at another, without being at the keyboard for either. You might say it like this: “Put these 200 products on sale for the weekend and put the prices back.”

Steps in SwiftGrid Pro

1. Open SwiftGrid and filter to the products, for example a category.
2. Enter the new sale prices in the grid. Type them, use the cell calculator one cell at a time, or paste a column of sale prices from a spreadsheet. The edits stay pending.
3. Open the menu beside Save Changes and choose Schedule changes…. The dialog summarizes the pending edits, for example how many changes across how many products.
4. Set Apply at. Set Revert at as well if the prices should go back. The times are in your site’s timezone. The apply time must be at least 1 minute ahead, and the revert time at least 1 minute after the apply time.
5. Click Schedule. SwiftGrid checks every row with the same rules as Save, so a row that would fail is reported in the dialog and not days later.

What Happens Next

• At the apply time, WordPress’s scheduler (WP-Cron) runs the change in chunks through the grid’s own save path. SwiftGrid writes the values you entered. It records each field’s value from immediately before. The change runs at or shortly after the time you set.
• At the revert time, each field goes back to the value it held immediately before the change. A field you or anyone else edited in the meantime is left alone, and SwiftGrid reports it as skipped.
• The status bar shows how many changes are scheduled. Click that badge to open the list, with each entry marked Scheduled, Applying, Applied, Applied, reverted, Failed or Cancelled. Click Cancel on an entry that has not run yet to stop it.

A schedule covers up to 1000 products. It stores the exact values you entered, so a product whose price changes before the apply time still receives the stored value. The schedule runs as the user who created it, and SwiftGrid checks that user can still edit products when it runs.

What Is Free and What Is Pro

Pro Scheduled edits with auto-revert.

Free Everything before the schedule step: filters, editing sale prices by typing, pasting or the cell calculator, and saving at once with Save Changes.

See what is in Pro on the SwiftGrid page.

Compared With Native WooCommerce

WooCommerce schedules sales per product. On each product’s edit screen, click Schedule next to the sale price and enter a start and end date. The bulk edit on the Products screen has no date fields. The CSV importer can set Date sale price starts and Date sale price ends for many products from a file.

SwiftGrid’s schedule is a separate mechanism. It writes the sale price at the apply time and puts the old value back at the revert time, and it leaves the product’s own sale date fields empty. It works for any fields you can edit in the grid, not only the sale price.

Limits

• SwiftGrid has no sale start and end date columns, and no named campaigns.
• Timing depends on WP-Cron, which runs when WordPress is triggered. A site with very little traffic may run it late unless your host runs WP-Cron on a real schedule.