The status of a product: Active is on sale in the channels it is published to, Draft is a work in progress no customer sees, Archived is a product you stopped selling but keep for its history.
Every Shopify product has one of three statuses:
- Active: on sale, in every sales channel it is published to;
- Draft: still being prepared. No channel shows it, even if it is published to them;
- Archived: no longer sold. It is hidden everywhere, but kept with its orders and reports. You can make it active again.
A product needs both things to appear on a site: the Active status and the publishing to that site’s channel. Most “my product is not showing” questions are one of the two.
In Webflow terms
Draft and Active work like a Webflow CMS item that is a draft or published, with one difference: in Shopify, publishing is per channel, so an active product can still be missing from one of your sites.
In Smootify
A product that is not active, or not published to the Headless channel, is not returned by Shopify: the CMS sync does not import it, and a product page that points to it hides the product. condition="product-unavailable" can show a message in its place, the same one used for a product not sold in the visitor’s market.
More in The product page and Set up the Shopify store.