Helm › Helm University › Track 2 › Lesson 2.2
Lesson 2.2Price, compare at price, and honest discounts
One of these two numbers is enforced and the other is entirely on your conscience.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Set a price and a compare at price correctly, and know what Helm does and does not check about them.
Price is the number that charges
Your price is what a buyer pays, in whole cents, from zero up to a million dollars. Zero is allowed and it is not a bug: a free item settles instantly without going anywhere near a card.
The price a buyer is charged is always recomputed on the server at the moment of checkout. The client never supplies a price and Helm never trusts one. That is a security property rather than a courtesy, and it is the reason a tampered page cannot buy your product for a dollar.
Compare at price is not checked at all
Compare at is the struck through number next to your price. Helm stores whatever you put there and does not verify that it is higher than your actual price, does not check that you ever sold at it, and does not require any history.
Being blunt about that: the honesty of a compare at price is entirely yours. A fake one is exactly the kind of thing that produces a bad review and a refund request, both of which cost you more than the sale was worth. Several jurisdictions also regulate reference pricing, and Helm not checking it does not make it legal where you are.
What Helm does check
Both numbers must be whole cents inside the same range. That is the entire validation. There is no minimum price, no maximum discount on a compare at, and no rule that one exceeds the other.
Where a real discount comes from
If you want a genuine markdown that the platform enforces, that is a flash sale, and it works completely differently. Helm applies the percentage server side, at read time and again at charge time, so the discounted price is real rather than a number written next to another number. Lesson 2.9 covers it.
Compare at price is a claim. A flash sale is a mechanism.
What your price does not include
Sales tax is added by Stripe at the checkout page, not by you and not by Helm. You set the price of the item; the buyer sees the tax added on top once they give an address.
Shipping is currently free on every order. Per shop shipping rates are not built, and the shipping figure in every calculation is a hard zero. If your product needs postage paid, that cost has to live inside your price today. Track 5 covers what the fees do to what is left.