The scheduled time has passed, the storefront still shows the old price, and the admin gives you no error to read. This is the worst kind of failure because there is nothing to search for: the tool did not say no, it simply did not act.
There are four common causes and they need checking in a specific order, because the cheap checks rule out the expensive ones.
1. The timezone, which costs 30 seconds to rule out
A scheduled sale runs on the store's timezone. If you set it from a different one, the sale is not broken, it is simply not due yet. Settings, General, Store defaults shows the store timezone. Compare it against the time you typed.
Fastest first
This is the single most common cause and the only one you can confirm without touching anything. Check it before you start cancelling and rebuilding, because a rebuild while the original is still pending gives you two sales racing each other.
2. The scope matched nothing
A collection that was renamed, a tag with a trailing space, a filter that excluded everything: the job ran, found no variants and reported success. Open the sale and look at the variant count it recorded, not the one you expected. Zero is a scope problem, not a scheduling problem.
3. The job is running and you are early
A catalogue of a few thousand variants does not change price instantly. One merchant wrote that it took fourteen minutes while thirty customers waited. That is not a failure, but it is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering at launch.
| Variants | Rough run time |
|---|---|
| 500 | under 5 minutes |
| 2,000 | 15 to 20 minutes |
| 10,000 | an hour or more |
If the price changes are appearing gradually, the job is working. Do not cancel it. Cancelling halfway leaves part of the catalogue discounted and part not, which is a much harder state to reason about than either extreme.
4. The app lost its session
Scheduled work runs without you present, using a token stored at install time. If that token was invalidated, by a password change, a staff account removal or a reinstall, the schedule survives but the permission to act does not. The tell is that nothing at all happened, not even a partial run.
What to do while you are diagnosing
- Decide whether to hand-discount your top ten sellers now. Traffic is arriving at full price and that cost is real while you investigate.
- Do not create a second scheduled sale over the top of the first. Two overlapping jobs writing the same variants is how prices end up somewhere neither of them intended.
- Write down the current prices of anything you change by hand. A restore only knows about the values a tool recorded, and a manual edit made during an incident is invisible to it.
Before the next one
Run the sale against three products a week early, at a time you are awake, and let it end on its own. The rehearsal costs nothing and tells you the run time, the timezone and the scope in one pass.