Drafts and publishing
Every option set is either a draft or published.
What publishing actually does
Section titled “What publishing actually does”Publishing is not a visibility flag. It is the step that sends your pricing configuration to Shopify, where the checkout function reads it.
That has a consequence worth understanding: the price a customer is charged comes from the configuration as it was at the moment you published. Editing a draft changes nothing on the storefront, and changes nothing about what customers are charged, until you publish again.
Draft behaviour
Section titled “Draft behaviour”A draft set:
- Renders no fields on the storefront, even on assigned products.
- Contributes nothing to any price.
- Is fully editable without risk to live orders.
This makes drafts the right place to build and rework a set. There is no separate staging mode — a draft is the staging mode.
After you publish
Section titled “After you publish”Changes reach the storefront within about a minute. Responses are cached briefly, so if you publish and immediately reload a product page you may see the previous version. Hard-refresh after a moment before investigating further.
Unpublishing
Section titled “Unpublishing”Setting a published set back to draft removes its fields from the storefront and stops its price adjustments.
Existing orders are unaffected. The choices a customer already made are recorded on their order, and reverting a set does not rewrite history.
A checklist before publishing
Section titled “A checklist before publishing”- Every option has the label a customer should read, not an internal name.
- Required options are genuinely required.
- Pricing rules have the amounts you intend — check a worked example, not just the numbers in the form.
- The set is assigned to the products you mean. See Assigning to products.