Running a sitewide sale: how sale prices show in your emails
Last updated: August 26, 2026
Planning a sitewide sale, BFCM promotion, or any storewide price drop? This article explains how Zaymo picks up your new prices, when the strikethrough "was $X" price appears, and the one step you need to take before your sale sends go out.
Please note: sitewide discounts will not display properly in Zaymo blocks. The price shown will not include your discount. The discount will only apply at checkout, not in the email.
The short version
Zaymo shows whatever price Shopify reports for each product variant. It has no separate sale setting to turn on. Two things decide what your recipients see:
How you built the sale in Shopify. A price change shows in the email. A discount code or automatic discount does not.
When you exported the template. Product prices are captured at export time, so a template exported before your price change will keep showing the old price.
How to make sale prices show in the email
Lower the price and keep the original as the compare-at price. This is the standard Shopify sale setup, and it is the only one Zaymo can display.
When a variant has a compare-at price higher than its price, Zaymo automatically shows the sale price with the original struck through. There is no setting to enable. If there is no compare-at price, the strikethrough simply does not appear.
Automatic discounts and discount codes work differently. If your sale is set up as an automatic discount or a code applied at checkout, your product prices in Shopify have not changed, so the email shows full price. The discount still applies correctly when the shopper reaches checkout, and their total will be right. They just will not see the sale in the email itself.
If you want the sale visible in the email, change the prices. If you only need the discount honored at checkout, an automatic discount is fine.
Do this before your sale sends
Prices are captured when a template is exported, and Zaymo refreshes its copy of your Shopify catalog once a day. So the order matters:
Update your prices in Shopify and confirm they are live on your storefront.
Wait for the next daily catalog refresh, or ask Zaymo support to refresh your product data right away.
Send yourself a test of your new email and check the price on the product block.
If a template still shows pre-sale prices
Work through these in order:
Confirm the price is live in Shopify, on the variant itself. The variant price is what Zaymo reads.
Check when that specific template was last exported. If it was before the price change, re-export it. This is the most common cause.
Check whether the price data has refreshed. Zaymo refreshes catalog data daily. If you changed prices this morning and need them live today, contact support and we can refresh your product data immediately.
Check which email client you were viewing in. See below.
A note on Outlook and other non-interactive clients
In Gmail and Apple Mail, prices are rendered as live text. In Outlook and other clients that do not support interactive email, product prices are rendered as an image instead, and those images are cached for up to several days for performance.
That means an Outlook recipient can briefly see a pre-sale price even after everything else has updated. Re-exporting the template clears this, because a fresh export generates fresh images. This is another reason to re-export ahead of the sale rather than during it.
Sale checklist
Step | When |
|---|---|
Change prices in Shopify, with compare-at set to the original | Before anything else |
Confirm prices are live on your storefront | Immediately after |
Refresh product data (daily automatically, or ask support) | Same day |
Re-export every sending template | After the refresh |
Send a test and check prices | Before the first send |
Still seeing the wrong price?
Reach out to support with the template name, the product, the email client you were viewing in, and when the template was last exported. Those four details let us confirm the cause quickly.