Automating a storewide sale on headless Shopify

A headless Shopify store needed a true sitewide sale for Black Friday—different discount tiers based on product types and metafields, while honoring opt-outs and affiliate/internal rules. Shopify’s native options boiled down to coupon codes or manual bulk edits.

Both were risky: hours of clicking, inconsistent rules, no real scheduling, and a high chance of mismatched pricing between backend and storefront.

We built a small, policy-driven service inside the headless stack instead. It reads the catalog through the Storefront API with smart filters on product type and metafields, so only eligible products are touched and opt-outs stay untouched.

A simple discount matrix based on product types and some metafield values is derived from compare-at pricing to avoid margin surprises.

The whole thing runs on a schedule, so the sale flips automatically at launch time with no 2 a.m. heroics. Bulk variant updates flow through the Admin API with throttling to keep API usage smooth, and the headless frontend cache is revalidated immediately so “-50%” badges and prices appear in sync within seconds.

Under the hood we paginated through thousands of products, applied the discount map, respected opt-out metafields, logged progress and any API errors, and revalidated cache tags and paths so the UI couldn’t drift from the backend state.

The result: thousands of products updated in minutes, zero manual edits, no lag between backend changes and the storefront experience. The team spent Black Friday watching performance instead of firefighting operations.