Schedule Product Availability While Showing the Product on Site

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello,

I would like to have items visible on my site, but with the product scheduled to go live with the allotted inventory at a certain time. It appears now that if I schedule product availability, the product does not show up on my web store until that date and time. I believe this is achievable via LaunchPad but I do not have Shopify Plus. Is there a comparable tool to LaunchPad available for Shopify Advance plan?

Thanks,

Karsen

2

Yeah, absolutely a great feature

3

Hi,

The distinction you’ve made here between publishing a product and making it purchasable is the important part.

Shopify’s normal product scheduling works well if you’re happy for the product to remain hidden until launch. It’s less useful when you actually want customers to see the product beforehand, but prevent purchasing until a specific date and time.

I work with LaunchGuard, a Shopify app built specifically around scheduled product launches, and this is one of the problems it’s designed to solve.

Instead of keeping the product unpublished, the workflow can be:

Product visible before launch → Coming Soon state → optional countdown → purchasing automatically opens at the scheduled launch time

That means customers can view the product page, images and details ahead of the release, while you prepare the launch in advance rather than manually changing things when the clock hits the launch time.

You can also group products into a launch campaign if multiple products are dropping together, and use VIP early access if you want selected customers to get access before the general launch.

So for the scenario you described, I wouldn’t necessarily try to recreate Launchpad or rely on Shopify’s scheduled publishing. The product can stay visible while the launch itself is scheduled separately.

For a one-off release, custom theme logic can certainly achieve something similar. But if you’re doing regular product drops, the advantage of managing it as a launch campaign is that the pre-launch state, countdown and transition to live can all be configured beforehand.