Hello,
I imported my website from Squarespace to Shopify; therefore, it created the exact same publish date for everything that was imported.
I want to use Sort Collections > by Newest but that does not work because they all have the same publish date.
I cannot go in and duplicate/recreate hundreds of new products one-by-one to alter the publishing dates. That is not practical and would take days.
Q. What is the method for changing the publishing dates on individual products?
Hi, @shanekeller ! Welcome to the platform and thanks for dropping by the Community Forums here to ask your question!
To edit more than one product’s availability/future publish date you can do this through bulk editing. I’ve gone ahead and made a quick video from my testing store to show you how that works:
Alternatively, you can also use an app from the Shopify app store. Matrixify is known to be able to bulk update published dates for products as well.
I’d like to also bring up that there is an all products/collections page attributed to your store. You have control over what you wan to show up there as well. You can use this guide here to help you control your collection page there. It’s a good idea if you have some closed collection items that you only want some people to see or if you have items you don’t want to show up in the list of all products, etc. Keeps your site clean, avoids prying competitors from seeing what you have for exclusive items, and your business integrity stays intact at all times.
Hello @Lilith and @shanekeller
Renars here from Matrixify app, thank you for mentioning us!
The collection sorting for migrated Products is a known issue in Shopify.
You sure can use the Matrixify app to bulk update your Product Published At dates.
However - there are a few issues with this in Shopify:
That being said - there are still workarounds for this:
You can look into changing the Collection sorting manually and just force specific order of the Products.
Here we have a tutorial on how to bulk change product positions in collections.
Another solution is to actually create them in the correct order.
The date would still not be in the past, but you can force the app to create Products in the order as they are in your file.
So as long as your file is sorted correctly, the items will be created in that order thus the collection sorting would also work.
To do so, you would need to export all the Products from the store, ideally using the Matrixify app. Include exporting all Product details as you will need that to re-create the Products.
Once you have the exported file, you need to change the order of products to the correct one. This is a tricky task to do as each product contains multiple rows, but if you are familiar with Excel, it should be doable. It is important that all rows from the same Product are next to each other and each product’s top row is the first row for that Product.
Set the Command columns value to REPLACE for all Products so that the app deletes the existing Product and creates a new one from the data in the file. When the file is ready, upload that into the app, and in the import options select the option Import items in the order as they appear in file.
So when importing, the app will create items one by one, in the order as they are in the file. Thus the Product Created At dates will be at the time of the import, but in the correct order, as you need them.
I hope that this could work for you. If you have any questions or issues along the way - please reach out to our support directly.
Yep, this is the only way I thought too. I don’t get why a basic functionality isn’t implemented in this very used ecommerce.
I just ran into this, migrated 2000 products from Volusion only to find out that my collections are way out of order, I can’t believe Shopify doesn’t offer a simple way to fix this, Volusion, which is a much inferior platform IMO has a date that can be easily changed or imported and that date determines the order in which products are displayed in Collections (Volusion calls them Categories). With this said, I paid for Matrixify (excellent app by the way) and I am currently in the process of exporting everything, I hope it works for me. As for sorting, very easy to do with Excel, I was able to download a products file from Volusion, matched the Skus to those shown in the Matrixify export and then took the row from Volusion called “Display Date” and copied/pasted to a new row on the Matrixify file, then sorted everything based on that row showing oldest date first and newest date last, I am going to try an import and hope it works.
@Lilith Is there any plan for Shopify to fix this terrible issue? At the very least, let the “created at” date be edited. I have the same issue as other folks with migrating and my products not sorting by date correctly. I have been waiting a long time for this to be solved by Shopify. I do have the Matrixify app, but the “created at” field is not importable to Shopify, so that is not a solution. I do not want to manually order all of my collections - I want them to be sorted by new to old. I also want my customers to be able to sort products that way.
Honestly, I can’t believe with all the latest updates Shopify would not also address this problem.
Can you tell us if it is in any plan to fix?
Thanks
cynthia
I agree! We need to be able to edit the “created at” date. I have an online store that also runs in-person pop-ups. I sometimes create basic product listings for the pop-up but then later update those listings with better product photos before it’s available online. The problem is that I launch the items in a different order than they are created, so I can’t just have a collection that’s “sort by new arrival” without manually editing it constantly. PLEASE GIVE US THIS FEATURE!!
So, if I use REPLACE for the main Product command, won’t they all have the exact same new creation date? Are you saying it will accept new created at dates if you are using the REPLACE command? How do I have dates that are many years apart - REAL publication dates? I have products from the 90s, 00s, and from this month. Dates matter.
Regarding the sorting dropdown available - Surely the “Published At” field can be called out in the code just like the “Created at” is currently being called out - and the sorting language can therefore be changed to sort by the CORRECT field.
If you want to help, tell us where that code is in the files and what language to change.
Pleas.
@Renars : I replied to your post earlier today - I have additional info.
I don’t know if it is related to updates to Shopify or not, but, when I tried to use your REPLACE method for dates, it DOES NOT keep the image. This is a massive issue, and therefore your method does not work.
I can’t believe that every other ecomm platform I have worked with allows changing the create on date and Shopify does not. We have old products that the info all stays the same but we offer new colors or sizes and need to have an old product become a new product without having to duplicate and recreate the product. On top of that we would have to resync with our ERP for this “new” (but not new) product when all we really need to be able to do is update the Create On date.
@Renars Matrxify is awesome. Maybe you folks can work with Shopify and get them to allow you to upload changes to the Created At date. It really is a much needed feature over the work arounds. SO many work arounds needed for things that are basic to other platforms.
We need a way to change the created on date not just the published date. Shopify needs to make this happen. We should not have to constantly recreate products just to get a new date when a product is refreshed on the site. Especially if we also have to sync said products with an ERP.
Seriously Shopify - now you have messed with all of our sites by changing and injecting “Winter 23” code, and yet you STILL haven’t addressed the Created at / published at issue!!!
Are you taking lessons from Apple on how to treat your long time customers? By giving us what you want and ignoring what we ask for? Why be like the dumb brother?
Hi @Shopify_77 team, this seems to be a major issue that we are now facing. We have migrated our client’s shop from Woocommerce to Shopify, and their entire product catalogue is ordered differently because at the time of migration the Created At date and time is new. It does not take into account the order it was published on Woocommerce, even though the Published At date is migrated.
How come do you expect shops to be migrated to Shopify if we can’t get this solved? It’s not acceptable to expect collections to be manually sorted as this is not scalable.
Also it’s not acceptable to expect products to be recreated one by one so they have new creation dates.
And by the looks of it, using Matrixify to REPLACE products can cause issues related to image galleries and multi-market pricing.
Please do something about it! I can’t understand why keeping the Created At information is so sensitive that it cannot be changed.
Hi Lilith, any update on this please? Why can’t we change the parameter used by the filter “New to old” to pick the publishing date instead of creation?
