Publish Shopify products at future date in bulk

If you have Products that you wish to make available in your Online Store at a future date then Matrixify offers you the ability to publish products in bulk, and you can schedule such import in the future, just in time for your sale!

Steps in short

1. Create unpublished Products in the Shopify Admin or in bulk with the Matrixify.
2. With Matrixify export your unpublished Products by applying filters.
3. Edit your file by keeping only the following columns, and set their publishing values:
   • ID
   • Handle
   • Published
   • Published Scope
4. Upload the file in the Matrixify app.
5. In the Import Options – set “Schedule on” date
6. Press the “Schedule” button to schedule your import at the date that you have set.

Let’s go through each step in detail:

1. Create unpublished Products

Prepare your Products in Shopify in such a way that they exist there, but are not yet published to your site – so your clients will not see them yet.
Those will be the products which you want to publish at a certain date, e.g. for your sales campaign which starts at a specific date.

There are multiple ways you can create your Products.
You can do so in the Shopify Admin -> Products manually or you can follow our Product import tutorial to do it bulk with the Matrixify.

2. Export unpublished Products

Do new export from Matrixify

In the Matrixify app Home page click on the “New Export” button in the “Export” section.

A new export page will open where you can set up your export.

Set up your export

Select items to export

On this page, you will only need to select the “Products” checkbox in the “Select Sheets” drop-down and once you have done this, select “Basic Columns”.

Apply filters

Now you can apply the filter to your export to only export Products that are not published.
Simply click on the “Filter” button under Products to select filters that you need including “Published Status” -> “unpublished”

You can also apply other filters if you need to limit the data that you are exporting, check our “Export Filters” documentation to see details about each available filter.

Export your file

Click on the “Export” button to start the export.
You will see the export starting and progress of it while it is running.

Once the export is finished you will see a green “Finished” label, then you can click on the “Download Exported File” button to download the file on your computer.

3. Edit your file

Delete unnecessary columns

Since you will only need to change availability for your Products then there is no need to import all the fields.

Here we only need to identify Product and have the fields that are needed for this update.

From the exported file you will need to only have columns:

• ID
• Handle
• Published
• Published Scope

Before

After

Update Published and Published Scope columns

Now with Published and Published Scope columns, we can tell the app in which channels we will need to publish our Products.

Shopify allows publishing products on only two sales channels – Online Store and Point of Sale. So here is a small cheat-sheet of how to achieve all possible published states:

If we assume that Products only need to be published in the “Online Store” sales channel, then you just need to change “Published” to “TRUE”.

Save the file once you have finished editing it.

4. Upload file to the Matrixify app

Now you can head back in the Matrixify app and in the “Import” section upload the file by clicking the “Add File” button or dragging the file in the “Import” area.

After the file will be uploaded a new import page will open where you can set up your import.

5. Set “Schedule on” date

Before starting the import you will need to tell the app to import the file at a future date.

To do so –  go to the “Options” section on the import page and select “Schedule on” checkbox.
Besides this checkbox, you can select a future date when to bulk publish your Products.

You can leave other options as they are by default.
Check out our “How it works” page for more details on Import Options.

6. Schedule the import to Shopify

Now you can press the “Schedule” button to schedule your import and you are done!

You can see that the import job status has been changed to “Scheduled”.

Feel free to close the app and if you wish to check on this job later, you can do so by going into the Matrixify apps “All Jobs” page where you can see all your store’s future, queued, running and past import and export jobs.
There you can click on the job to see more details about it.

What to do next?

1. Install the Matrixify app.
2. By default, the store owner will receive a notification when scheduled import starts and finishes. Change this in Matrixify app Settings in your store.
3. It’s best if you make a small test file with 1-2 Products, and do the small scheduled update to start after 2 minutes, and see how it performs – if everything got updated as you needed. Then change the products back to unpublished, and schedule the real large file. That way you will know for sure that you have prepared your file correctly.
4. Wish to know what each field from our export file means? Check out our Product documentation.
5. Contact Matrixify support if you run into any issues or have additional questions.