You can see all the wonderful Ave products in your back office, but not on your website. What do you do? You make them available, that's what! And this guide will show you how.

But first, a little Shopify background.

Understanding how products work on Shopify will be extremely helpful as you start to work with Ave. If you are a Shopify pro you can skip this section.

Shopify sales channels are all the places you might sell products (IE Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, etc). The most common, and the one relevant to this guide, is your website, which Shopify calls 'Online store'.

In order for a product to be visible on your website (or any other sales channel), that sales channel needs to be enabled.

Shopify recently introduced something new called 'Product status', which can be set to 'Active' or 'Draft'. All Ave products will be created with an 'Active' status, but unavailable on your 'Online store' sales channel, so it won't show up on your website until you publish it.

We do this on purpose so you are in control if which products actually launch on your website, and so that you have time to change prices, edit descriptions, or make any other changes you want before launching a product.

All Ave releases go live at 8am Mountain time (7am Pacific, 9am Central, 10am Eastern) on their specified launch day. You should not publish them on your website (or sell them in other ways) until that day/time.

Our recommended method is to schedule them to go live at the exact right time. This is nice because days in advance you can schedule them to go live, and then you don't have to be on your computer at launch time.

Let's assume you want to scheduled the items in the 3/1/2024 release. Here's how to do it...

Step 1: In your Shopify back office click 'Products' on the left hand menu.

Step 2: Click on the magnifying glass icon to the far right to open up the search & filter.

Step 3: Click on the 'Tagged with' filter and enter the tag for the release you'd like to publish: 3-1-2024

Step 4: Check the box at the top of the list to select all products in the release, then click 'Bulk Edit' on the far right. This will open a page called 'Bulk editor', which lets you make changes to many products at once.

Step 5: Click 'Columns' at the top right once you open the bulk editor. This will allow you to choose what you what to edit about the product.

If you have more than one sales channel enabled there will be multiple checkboxes here. This will add a new column to the bulk editor for each sales channel. Currently, we're only aware of the Online Store allowing scheduling.

Step 6: Check the Online Store and Online Store Schedule box if you would like to schedule the item to release at a certain day/time, and add the date and time you want the item to publish on that sales channel.

Choose the correct date and time for the item to launch. In this example that would be 3-1-2024 at 8am Mountain (7am Pacific, 9am Central, or 10am Eastern, depending on your time zone).

Repeat the same process for all the items in the release all the way down the line, then click the 'Save' button in the top right corner.

Note: If the first box isn't checked for Online Store, it won't allow you to check the Online Store Schedule box and click into the calendar to select the day/time.

Once you get it down, the whole process should only take a few minutes. Come launch time the products will go live on your site at precisely the right time, without you having to be at your computer.

While the scheduling method above is our recommended approach it is also possible to immediately publish products to your website.

Step 1: Pull up the products in the desired release in the same way by clicking 'Products' in your Shopify back office. Then click the search and filter magnifying glass, 'Tagged with', and enter the release date tag.

Step 2: Check the box at the top of the list to select all products, then there are three little dots at the far right and when you hover over them it will say 'More Actions'.

Step 3: In that menu, you'll see bulk editing options that you can do immediately for these products. The option you're looking for in this example is 'Include in sales channels'.

Step 4: In the popup window check the box next to 'Online Store' (and any other desired sales channels), then click 'Include Products'.

Note: If you only have one sales channel enabled the products will be made available immediately without the popup window.

The selected products will now be live on your website.

It is also possible to schedule a single product to go live in the future, or publish it immediately. We are all about convenience, so this is our least favorite method, but just in case, here's how to do it.

Step 1: Open the product in your Shopify back office then click the three little dots to 'Manage sales channels'.

Step 2: Check the box next to 'Online Store' and other sales channels you'd like to publish to, and then click 'Done'.

Step 3: After clicking done, Shopify will take you back to the product where you can click 'Save' at the top right.

That single product will now be live on your website!

Love what you've learned? Here's a video that goes over our recommended process in Shopify that has a few pro tips drizzled in. :) It's longer, but worth it!

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to our dedicated support team through chat or email hello@theavenueshops.com.