How can I view the creation or publish dates of my store products?

Shopify Apps
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Topic summary

A merchant seeks to view product creation/publish dates in Shopify to manage inventory clearance and analyze sales velocity. Shopify doesn’t display these dates natively in the admin interface, prompting discussion of workarounds.

Native Solutions:

  • Adding /products.json to the store URL reveals product metadata including creation dates, but displays only ~250 products at a time in raw JSON format
  • Store Activity log contains the data but cannot be exported
  • Bulk Edit view: Select all products → Bulk Edit → Add “Online Store” column to see publish dates (works but slow for large catalogs; one user reported 1.5 hours to view 2,500 of 16,000 products)
  • Adding /events.json to individual product URLs shows limited event history

Third-Party Apps Suggested:

  • Report Toaster, Better Reports, and Xporter Data Export Tool can generate exportable reports with creation/publish dates
  • Most require paid subscriptions, though some offer free trials

Shopify Flow Workaround:
One user created an automated flow to tag products with creation dates, which can be applied retroactively to existing inventory using bulk actions.

Status: The discussion remains open with no perfect free solution. Users express frustration that this basic functionality isn’t built into Shopify’s reporting.

Summarized with AI on October 25. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Hi @Groupie

Claudia here from Better Reports.

Have you been able to find a solution? If not, I would recommend our app Better Reports for this.

From our Inventory reports, you can access both the product and variant created_at date and the product published_at date. We can also include a custom field showing the number of days since the variant or product last sold, and also create a sell-through measure.

In addition to this, Better Reports has more than 60 built-in reports available out of the box that cover many common use cases for merchants. You can schedule reports to run at set frequencies to your email or Google Drive or export the reports in CSV, Excel or PDF format.

I encourage you to install Better Reports and start your free 14-day trial and I’ll be happy to set this up for you.

What do you think?