Drafts & Publishing
Your storefront has two versions at any moment: what shoppers see (live), and what you're working on (a draft). Understanding the ladder between them explains every state the builder can be in.
your browser ──Save──▶ draft ──Publish edits──▶ live store
The three tiers
| Toolbar shows | Where your work is | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Unsaved | Only in your browser | Only you, in this tab |
| Saved · not published | On the draft, on our servers | You, and anyone you send a preview link |
| Published | Live | Every shopper |
The status indicator always reports the furthest tier your work has reached, so there's exactly one thing to act on next: Save, then Publish, then nothing.
Nothing is sent to the server on a timer. Your keystrokes are mirrored to your browser's local storage as you type — so a crash or accidental close doesn't lose work; the builder offers to restore it on next load — but until you hit Save, the draft on the server doesn't have it. Publish always saves first, so what you publish is always what's on screen.
Opening the builder: live is a view
Opening the builder shows the live store, read-only — the switcher says "Live (view only)". The moment you edit anything, the builder creates a draft (or moves you onto your existing one) and the edit lands there. You never write to live directly, and nothing is refused: editing simply opts you into drafting.
What a draft contains
A draft is an overlay of only what you changed — pages you touched, settings you touched — over the live store. Publishing applies exactly those entities and nothing else: publishing a color tweak cannot silently revert a colleague's navbar change, because the navbar was never in your draft.
You can keep several drafts (the switcher lists them) — for example, one for a seasonal campaign staged weeks ahead and one for day-to-day edits. Each shows whether it actually holds unpublished changes.
Publishing
Publish edits makes the draft live and closes it; the builder lands you on the live view, and your next edit starts a fresh draft. Discarding a draft works the same way — the draft closes, live was never touched.
Conflicts. If someone published a change to the same page or setting after you started editing it, Publish stops before writing anything and shows you each conflicted item with a per-item choice: keep mine or take theirs. Nothing goes live until every conflict is resolved — and choosing "theirs" is a real option, not a dead end, when their version is the one you want.
Restore points
Every Save takes a restore point first — a snapshot of the draft before your changes land, up to 10 per draft. Rolling back restores the draft (not live), so you can safely unwind an experiment. Publishing itself is also recoverable: the publish history keeps prior live states.
Preview links
Preview opens the draft as shoppers would see it, on your real store domain, via a share-safe link. The link is read-only — whoever you send it to can look but never edit — and expires after a week.
Page visibility ≠ publishing
Two different switches are easy to confuse:
- Publish edits — makes your staged changes live. Store-wide.
- Show / hide page — whether one page is visible to shoppers. It's a page setting, staged on the draft like any other edit, and only takes effect when you publish.
Two editors, and AI assistants
Two people can open the builder at once; the second gets a warning that someone else is editing, but isn't blocked — coordinate, because whoever saves last wins for the entities they both touched (the conflict check protects you against published overlaps, not two people typing into the same draft).
AI assistants connected over MCP are held to a stricter rule: while a person is actively editing a draft, agent writes to that draft are refused — the human always outranks the agent. Agent writes land on drafts like everything else, take a restore point first, and go live only when a person publishes.