How do I have a product be available online but not able to be purchased until a set time?

[thethrowshop]

Hello! I already know how to set the timer to make a product publish on the online sales channel..but how can I have the product be available but just not able to add to cart (or better yet not see variants or photos just find the product and read the description) and purchase the product until a set future time? So that a customer may find and read a product and see when it 'drops' but not actually buy and then a timer goes off and they can then buy it?

[SealSubs-Roan]

Hi @thethrowshop !

For this feature, you may want to use pre-order or coming soon applications. Here are some of my app recommendations for you to check and see what works best for you: Coming Soon Product | Pre‑Sale, Preorder Wolf, PreCom, and PreOrder Alpha.

[JayAdra]

Hey there!

Off the back of what Roan said, you'd be better off using an app for this. Just wanted to throw my hat in the ring and say that we just launched a new pre-order app, Early Bird, which was specifically built with scheduled pre-order campaigns in mind (so you can set a start and end date and not have to worry about when to switch it on and off).

It will still show on your store, but will be "Coming soon" until the scheduled start date, at which point it will auto-publish and be available to purchase.

We have a bunch of other features around partial payments, discounts, custom messaging/labels etc., not to mention analytics too. If you'd like to give it a go, we have a 100% free plan you can use to try it out.

Let me know if you have any questions! Hope we can help.

[thethrowshop]

Hello can it allow the product to be shown online before the drop-date but in a way the customer cannot see the photos/variants available in advance? Or also in that way plus the ability to choose whether allowing for that or not? There are some products we sell with world-wide product release times that we're forbidden to display photos for in advance. So we'd want to be able to have the product be found and read the description then at a set time the variants and photos appear and appear in stock to buy, but not until that time is complete.

[JayAdra]

This would be tricky. The only safe way to do this would be to delete/remove the photos from the product, up until it's ready to be launched.

There may be workarounds where we can hide them using custom CSS code, but they will still technically be loaded on the page (just not visible), and some users might know how to unhide them.

So I guess it depends on how strict the rules are about showing photos in advance. If there are only a few products, maybe it's best to remove the photos from the product/s and re-add them later?

If there are a lot and hiding with CSS is okay, we could look at trying to get that working for your theme (it would almost certainly require making a change in the theme itself though, to ensure there's no flicker of the photos appearing while an app loads).