If I schedule product availability for a later date, does it also schedule for other sales channels?

[BaiLong333]

What I mean is, if I have a listing that I want to go live at 8:00 on Friday and I set the product availability for the store to that time does it also automatically apply to the other linked sales channels? There's only a option to specifically set a date and time under the "Online Store" sales channel. I don't see anything that says it does or does not apply to other sales channels automatically.

I would ASSUME it also applied to them as they're pulling products from the Online Store catalog, in which case the item wouldn't exist in the catalog yet.

Though, if anyone knows for certain...I'd really like to avoid accidentally making the product available on Facebook and Pinterest early by accident.

Thanks!

[Lilith]

Hi, @BaiLong333!

My name is Lilith, I'm on the Social Care team at Shopify. Thanks for asking this question!

The short answer is no. The schedule is only intended to be for the Online Store channel at this time. The option to schedule the product will only show up next to the Online Store sales channel:

That said, I'd be happy to forward a suggestion to the development team. I'll send the suggestion of adding options to schedule for other sales channels to our development team to review for a future update. I can't guarantee that it'll be available right away, but the more requests we have for this feature the likelier it is to be considered for feature updates down the road.

With your product not being available now, would this be a case of waiting for inventory, or are you hoping to create buzz around the product release?

One of the marketing strategies that many business owners use (including myself) is the pre-order hype technique.

If you do have a plan to launch a product a bit later, it can be a benefit to get some validation on the product desirability and to increase your conversions on other products in your store. You can plan a pre-sale campaign and use your current social following to boost interest in the product launch.

If you haven't considered incorporating this into your marketing plan, I would highly recommend it. It'll avoid the hassle of having to schedule a published date and you can gauge your product's future success in one swoop. We do have a blog post here that can help you out to see if this might be a better fit for your product launch.

Let me know how you do with the information above! I'm happy to answer any questions you think of as you work on your business.

[kimonodragon]

Hi Lilith! Is there any update on this feature or an app that provides this feature?

[mlg83]

This feature has been requested by Shopify users in the discussion forums for at least 5 years. What gives???

[LoveOdette]

Where do we request this feature? I launch my inventory in batches and like to schedule the release to create hype. Right now I'm having to turn OFF all the other sales channels, schedule the date for the online store, then after the inventory is live I have to scramble to quickly turn the other channels back on. Would be great if the scheduling feature was across the board for all channels, or if we could set a date for each channel. Thank you!

[justanothergal]

Shopify - you guys are huge, why hasn't this been done? I'm scheduling hundreds of products for an upcoming sale and unless I turn off Shop pay, it will still appear on multiple social channels to customers at the sale price right now. Then, as stated above, we have to scramble to turn it back on for EVERY. SINGLE. ITEM. and this is during a sale where we have the stress of making sure everything else is running. 

[Axr162]

I agree, that they need to implement scheduling on the shop app also.  As of now, we have to take it off the app then add it back into it when the product is live which is unnecessarily cumbersome.

[mandadee]

How is this not possible?? We sell products from many vendors and a lot of them have specific release dates when we are allowed to post products publicly. By chance, I just realized we had a new release being shown through the Shop app despite having the online store scheduled for a later date. In my opinion, all online channels should have the option of being on the same schedule. If I didn't happen to check we could have lost a vendor for breaking their rules.