Is there a way to let customers view an item without actually making it available?

[affinitysil]

I have a shop that sells out immediately after a restock, and I want to give customers a chance to see a preview of the upcoming listings before they become available. Like I want them to be able to look at multiple pictures and see prices, but not get through checkout. 

I used to be able to do this by sending an email (basic shopify email). It let me insert the products into my email while they were still in draft mode, and customers could click through the product page in preview mode. It was perfect. Something changed last month and that no longer works, so I need to find an alternative. 

My only ideas are to use a page builder to write up some kind of blog post where I share all the pictures and details. But that is not convenient at all. Do I have any other options? 

[PaulNewton]

Hi @affinitysil 👋 , give those products an alternate template with the add-to-cart buttons disabled AND for those products set to 0 inventory with disallow continue selling to prevent checkouts that might end up with those items in them; such as old carts/permalinks etc. Full rigor is setup backend automation to rejects such products if they endup with inventory early.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/os20/theme-structure/templates#create-a-new-t... 

Some alternatives are a second store as demo/preview store.

Or theme customizations present products like blog posts. Or vice versa use dummy data such as from a metaobject to fill in a product page.

And/or automations to create blog posts using product data.

Such as mechanic https://tasks.mechanic.dev/ or shopify-flow using the advanced admin action to interact with the api to create articles.

If you need to explore such a customization then contact me by my email for services.
Contact info in forum signature.
ALWAYS please provide context, examples: store url, theme name, post url(s) , or any further detail in ALL correspondence.

Otherwise, Good Hunting.

[affinitysil]

Thank you for the detailed response, I appreciate it!