“Live” is a status field. “Seen” is a shopper with the patience to scroll.
A homeware retailer I work with switched on seven new Christmas products in the run-up to its seasonal launch. The reply was four words. “I cannot see them.”
Every one of them was on the site. They were on the shop floor, right at the back, propped against the fire exit.
Here is the part most shops miss. The Christmas collection was sorted by hand, and when a new product qualifies for a hand-sorted collection, Shopify does not find it a good spot. It puts it at the end. So the seven newest things in the range sat at positions 388 to 394 of 394. Page 10 of 10.
The smaller themed collections told the same story. Last of 33. Last of 22. Every tick in the admin was green.
And the rest of the “missing” range? Not a tagging failure either. 57 of 161 products were still in draft. Nobody had lost them. Nobody had finished them.
We did not reorder anything. That page had been arranged by hand for the launch, and shuffling it the night before to rescue seven products would have swapped one problem for a bigger one. Where they belong is a merchandising decision, not a panic.
The lesson is not to check your products are live. It is to check where they are standing, because nobody walks past the fire exit to do their Christmas shopping.