Adding/Removing Products from the Online Store Sales Channel
Most merchants publish and unpublish products by changing their status (active/draft/archived), but you can also schedule products being added to or removed from the Online Store sales channel specifically.
Your shop may have several sales channels — for example Point of Sale or the Shop app — and, most likely, the Online Store sales channel, which is your main Shopify storefront. This schedule type adds your products to the Online Store channel on the start date and removes them on the end date, without touching their status.
You can also combine channel changes with a status change using the standard publish/unpublish schedule type.
Setting the initial action
Create the schedule, give it a name, then choose the initial action:
- Publish product(s) — products are added to the Online Store sales channel on the start date/time, whatever their status is at that moment.
- Unpublish product(s) — products are removed from the Online Store sales channel on the start date/time.
If your schedule has an end date, the opposite action happens automatically at the end.
Scheduling individual variants
This schedule type has a unique superpower: it can target individual variants. When selecting products, click Edit on any product to choose specific variants — only those variants will be added to or removed from your online store, and the rest of the product is untouched.
This is the way to temporarily hide certain variants (sizes, colourways, bundles) for a period of time — something status-based publishing can't do, since a product's status applies to the whole product. See also: Can I schedule individual variants?