How to publish a drop (and what happens behind the scenes)

Publishing a drop pushes everything you've configured live: the products in your connected store, the sale page, the variants, the pricing and the certificates. It runs a multi-step pipeline server-side and usually takes a few minutes.

When you publish

• First publish — at the end of the wizard, after the Preview step. The sale page goes live (or, if you've set a launch date, the page is live but the buy button stays off until launch).
• Republish — any time afterwards from the Edit Options hub, once you've edited something (prices, COA, schedule, page style, artworks, etc.).

Where the buttons are, and what they say

On the Edit Options hub the main button changes label depending on what you're publishing:

• Publish changes — for a drop (page + products).
• Push to store — for a single product that hasn't been pushed yet.
• Push edits to store — for a single product you've already pushed.

While it's running, the button reads Pushing….

The button is disabled when there's nothing to publish — i.e. an already-published drop or product with no unsaved changes. Make an edit first and it becomes active. When you do have unsaved edits, a line under the button reminds you ("You have unpublished changes to this drop." / "You have unpublished changes to this product."). A never-published drop or product instead shows "Not published to Shopify yet."

What the publish pipeline does

The runner works through these steps in order:

1. Plans the drop — validates the required fields and resolves the page style/theme.
2. Waits for variant shots — holds until the preview/print shots for every variant have finished generating. On a large multi-artwork drop this is the longest step.
3. Uploads print files to Shopify and polls until they're ready.
4. Creates/updates the products in your store, with all size and framing variants. Reuses the product if it already exists — and if a product was sitting in Shopify as a draft, publishing the drop makes it active (the page can't work otherwise). Once you've reviewed your drop page, you can set the products back to draft in Shopify so they're only reachable through the page. As part of this it publishes each product to the Online Store and (best-effort) assigns it to the theprintspace dropship delivery profile.
5. Attaches variant images and reads the products back to verify they landed correctly.
6. Compiles the page template(s) from your plan and uploads the theme assets (the page template plus the supporting JS/CSS) to your store theme, then verifies the assets are in place.
7. Creates the sale page, then verifies it's live (fetches the page and checks it returns OK).
8. Notifies you — sends a completion email and adds a notification.

A typical publish takes 2–5 minutes. You can stay on the page or close it — the pipeline runs server-side either way.

Delivery profile, not your own rates. Step 4 assigns the theprintspace dropship delivery profile so theprintspace's shipping rates apply — it does not push your own custom delivery rates. It's best-effort: if your Shopify token is missing the required scopes the product still gets created, it just isn't assigned a custom profile (you'd see this only in the logs).

If you're not on Shopify

The pipeline only does the Shopify work when Shopify is connected. If you're connected to Etsy, Woo, Wix or Squarespace instead, the Shopify-specific steps are skipped (marked succeeded) and only the planning and variant-shot steps run — the products are handed off to your platform's own sync.

Tracking publish status

The truthful publish status lives on the drop's card in the Drops list, as a badge:

• Draft — not published yet.
• Publishing… — the pipeline is running.
• Published — it actually reached your store. (This is backend-owned, so "Published" means it really landed, not an optimistic flip.)
• Publish failed — a step errored.

There's no separate progress panel or "Try again" button on the Edit Options hub. To retry after a failure, fix anything that needs fixing and publish again.

First publish vs republish

• First publish runs the full pipeline, including creating the Shopify product.
• Republish re-runs the pipeline against the existing product/page — it updates them in place rather than creating new ones.

Common reasons for delays

• Variant shots — high-resolution images take longer to generate, and the pipeline waits for all of them before pushing.
• Shopify rate limits — a multi-artwork drop makes a lot of API calls; the pipeline paces itself.
• First product on a new store — one-time setup (delivery profile lookup, theme assets) happens on the first publish.

What if it fails

• Most failures are transient (network blips, Shopify rate limits) and publishing again works.
• If the badge stays on Publish failed, the completion email will name the step that errored.
• Persistent failures need support — contact help@theprintspace.co.uk with the drop name.

Publish vs launch

• Publish = the page is built and live in your store.
• Launch date (set in Sale Schedule) = when customers can actually buy.

A drop can be published but not yet launched — the page exists and the countdown shows, but the buy button isn't active until the launch time. That lets you publish early, share preview links, and have everything ready before launch hour.