Publish, schedule & product status

The last step of the product wizard, SEO & Publish, decides whether a product is visible on your storefront and how it appears in search results. It combines two things: the Product Status (Draft, Active, or Scheduled) and the Search Listing (URL handle, meta title, meta description, an AI generator, a redirect option, and a theme template).

This page goes deep on that step. For the full guided product flow, see add products. For storewide SEO and indexing, see SEO on Sellerlane.

The three statuses

Open the product and go to the SEO & Publish step. Under Product Status, pick one of three options:

Status	What it does	When the storefront shows it
Draft (Not active)	Saved but hidden. The product exists in your catalog and you can keep editing it.	Never — buyers can’t see or buy it.
Active (Publish immediately)	Live now.	Right away, as long as the Online Store channel is on.
Schedule for later	Goes live automatically at a future date and time you set.	At the scheduled moment, then stays live.

Behind the scenes there’s a single publish timestamp:

Draft clears it, so the product is hidden.
Active sets it to now, so the product is live.
Scheduled sets it to a future time. Until that time passes, buyers see the product exactly as if it were Draft; after it passes, it behaves like Active.

Schedule a product

On the SEO & Publish step, choose Schedule for later.
A Publish Time field appears. Pick the date and time the product should go live. The default is tomorrow.
The time you enter is interpreted in your store time zone, which is shown next to the field so there’s no ambiguity. Set your store time zone under Settings → General if it isn’t right.
Save the product. It stays hidden until that moment, then publishes automatically — you don’t have to come back and flip it on.

There is no “Archived” status

Unlike some platforms, Sellerlane has no separate Archived state. Products are only ever Draft, Active, or Scheduled. To take a live product offline, do one of the following:

Set it back to Draft. This is the usual way to retire a product while keeping it in your catalog (and all its history) for later. Buyers can no longer see or buy it, but you can re-activate it any time.
Turn off the Online Store channel. On the Basic Info step, switch Online Store off under Sales Channels. The product can stay Active for POS while disappearing from your website.

Either approach hides the product immediately. Pick Draft if you’re stepping the product back in its lifecycle; turn off the channel if you only want to remove it from one place.

Edit the search listing

The Search Listing section controls how the product looks as a Google result and what its URL is. A live preview at the bottom shows the title, URL, and description as a buyer would see them in search.

URL handle

The URL Handle is the product’s path — your storefront serves it at /products/your-handle. Keep it short, lowercase, and readable; use hyphens between words. If you leave it blank, Sellerlane derives one from the product name.

Meta title & meta description

Meta Title — the clickable headline in search results. Aim for around 60 characters (the counter shows your length against 60); the counter turns red once you go past 70. If you leave it blank, search engines fall back to the product name.
Meta Description — the snippet under the title. Aim for around 160 characters (the counter shows your length against 160); it turns red once you go past 170. If blank, the start of your product description is used.

These are recommendations, not hard limits — you can save longer values, but search engines truncate them.

Spark SEO — generate the listing with AI

Next to the Search Listing heading is the Spark SEO button (marked with an AI badge).

Fill in the product’s name and description first — Spark SEO reads the details you’ve already entered (name, description, type, brand, category, variants, options, media alt text) to write a relevant listing.
Click Spark SEO. A Generated SEO card appears with a proposed meta title, meta description, URL handle, and tags.
Review the draft. Click Regenerate to try again, or Apply to fill the fields. Applying merges suggested tags with your existing ones rather than replacing them.
Edit anything after applying — Spark SEO gives you a starting point, not a locked result.

Create a URL redirect when you change a handle

Whenever you rename a product that’s already published, tick Create URL redirect before saving. Sellerlane then forwards the old /products/... path to the new one, so existing links, bookmarks, and indexed search results keep working instead of hitting a 404.

For a brand-new product that has never been live, the redirect option does nothing useful — leave it unticked.
For a renamed live product, always leave it ticked. There’s no separate redirects screen for renamed products; this checkbox is how path redirects are created. (The Search Redirects feature under SEO is a different thing — it rewrites on-site search queries, not product URLs.)

If an old product URL starts returning 404 after a rename, the checkbox was off when you changed the handle. Re-set the handle with Create URL redirect enabled. See SEO on Sellerlane for more on redirects.

Choose a theme template

The Theme Template dropdown lets you render this product with an alternate product template instead of the default product template. The list is built from the product templates in your active theme: Default plus any product.<suffix>.json templates that exist.

Use this when a product needs a different layout — say a product.bundle page for kits or a product.lookbook page for a hero-style launch. If the template you want isn’t listed, create it first in the theme editor; see alternate templates and manage themes. If a previously selected template is later deleted from the theme, the product quietly falls back to Default.

Status and sales channels

Visibility is the combination of Product Status and the Sales Channels you set back on the Basic Info step. There are two independent channels:

Online Store — your customer-facing website.
POS — Point of Sale, for in-person selling.

To sell online

Status must be Active (or a Scheduled time that has passed) and the Online Store channel must be on. Either one off = not on the storefront.

To sell in person only

Turn Online Store off and keep POS on. The product stays out of your website while remaining available at the register.

A Scheduled product respects its channels too: when the scheduled time arrives it becomes live, but it still only shows on the Online Store if that channel is enabled at that moment.

Troubleshooting

My product isn’t on the storefront. Check three things in order: the Product Status is Active (not Draft, and not a future Scheduled time), the Online Store channel is on (Basic Info step), and the product is in a published collection or your navigation if you expect it in a listing.
A scheduled product went live at the wrong time. Publish times use your store time zone, shown beside the Publish Time field. Confirm the store time zone under Settings → General.
An old product link 404s after I renamed it. The Create URL redirect checkbox was off when you changed the handle. Re-set the handle to the new value with the redirect ticked.
Spark SEO won’t run. Add a product name or description first — it needs product context to generate a listing.

Next steps

Product status & scheduling in context

Add products walks the whole wizard from Basic Info to publishing.

Improve discoverability

SEO on Sellerlane covers storewide titles, sitemaps, redirects, and indexing.

Alternate layouts

Alternate templates shows how to build the product.<suffix> templates that appear in the Theme Template dropdown.

Ready to launch?

Go live covers the final pre-launch checks once your products are Active.