What Is a Scheduled Campaign? Start and End Dates

How a Scheduled Campaign Runs

Think of it as a sale with an alarm clock. You pick the offer, the products it covers and the exact window, and then you walk away. The discount kicks in at the start time. When the end time comes, it stops.

In Shopify, every discount has active dates: a start date and time, plus an optional end date. If the start is in the future, Shopify shows the discount as Scheduled until then. No end date? Then it keeps running until you turn it off yourself.

The discount's only one piece, though. Your banner, emails, ads and any countdown each run on their own timing. The campaign isn't fully scheduled until every one of them points at the same window.

Scheduled, Evergreen or Per-Visitor?

An evergreen campaign is always on, with no end date. A scheduled one gets a single calendar window, and then it's done.

A time-limited offer is different again. Its clock can start when one visitor shows up, so two shoppers might see two different deadlines. With a scheduled campaign, everybody gets the same start and end.

When a Fixed Sale Window Helps

Busy dates. You can build your Black Friday sale weeks early instead of at midnight on the day.
Real deadlines. The end date is real, so "sale ends Sunday" is just a fact. It's not a sales trick.
Team prep. Whoever handles stock, support or email knows the exact hours to plan around.
Odd hours. A sale can open at 6 a.m. while you're still asleep.

When a Store-Wide Sale Eats Your Margin

A store-wide scheduled campaign hands the same discount to every shopper, including dedicated buyers who'd have paid full price anyway. On their orders, that discount is just margin you've lost.

Example: a candle shop's autumn weekend

A candle sells for $40 and costs $16 to make, so each one brings in $24 of gross profit. The shop schedules 20% off from Friday morning to Sunday night. Now the candle goes for $32 and earns $16.

To match a normal weekend's profit, it has to sell 1.5 times as many candles ($24 ÷ $16 = 1.5). Say it usually sells 100 on a weekend ($2,400 profit). Now it needs 150 just to break even (150 × $16 = $2,400).

There are two other risks. If you run the same sale on the same dates every year, some shoppers learn to wait for it. That's called discount fatigue. And if you keep moving the "last day," people stop believing your deadlines at all.

The Mix-Up: Scheduled Isn't the Same as Finished

A lot of owners think they're done once the end date is set. They're not. The discount stops on time, sure, but a homepage banner, a pinned post or a paid ad can keep promising the sale. Shoppers click through and the price they expected isn't there.

Time zones cause the same headache. A sale ending at midnight Eastern ends at 9 p.m. for shoppers in California. So put the time zone in your messages, and end every piece of the campaign at the same time. If two campaigns overlap, check whether their discounts are allowed to combine, too.

Scheduled Campaigns in Growth Suite

Our Shopify app, Growth Suite, includes Scheduled & Tiered Campaigns. That covers event-based, store-wide campaigns, plus tiered discounts that get bigger the more a shopper spends.

The app's everyday offers work differently. They're time-limited offers, each with its own countdown, shown only to visitors who look less likely to buy. So you get a choice: a store-wide window for a date everyone knows, or targeted offers that skip shoppers who are already set to buy. Want to compare other tools? Here are the best Shopify discount apps.

Planning the Dates Around It

This page just covers the term. For the full plan of what to do before, during and after a big sale, see our pre-during-post framework for scheduled holiday campaigns. And if you want to map every sale across the year ahead, use our yearly Shopify campaign calendar.