Use Shopify draft status when you want products to land in Shopify for review before they become visible on your storefront.

Before you start

Shopify must already be connected in Connect Dropstitch to Shopify.
Open Settings > Marketplaces > Shopify.
Decide whether draft should be your default Shopify listing status or only a temporary QA mode.

How it works

Dropstitch can push Shopify products as Draft instead of sending them live immediately.

When Default listing status is set to Draft, new Shopify pushes stay in draft until you manually activate them in Shopify. If your workflow needs exceptions, you can still override the status per product row.

This gives you a clean review checkpoint between Dropstitch output and live Shopify visibility.

How to use it

Go to Settings > Marketplaces > Shopify.
Set Default listing status to Draft.
Save the change.
Push products from List or Bulk List.
Open Shopify and review those products while they are still in draft.
Change the products from Draft to Active in Shopify when they are ready to go live.

Success check

Newly pushed Shopify products appear with status Draft.
Products only become visible on Shopify after you manually activate them.

Tips

Recommended approach: use draft-by-default when testing new Set up Templates in Dropstitch or new Shopify mappings.
Review the first few products in draft before you activate a larger batch.
Draft mode is especially useful when one teammate pushes from Dropstitch and another teammate does the final Shopify QA.

Advanced settings

Optional customization path: keep Shopify on draft by default and activate products in groups by collection, category, or merchandising priority.
This is slower than instant publish, but it gives you tighter storefront control before a drop goes live.
It works well when you want Shopify to be the last QA layer rather than the first place errors are discovered.

Troubleshooting

Products still go live immediately: recheck Default listing status and save the setting again.
Only some items are draft: inspect whether those products have per-item status overrides.
Cannot find the product in Shopify: confirm the publish completed successfully in Dropstitch and that Shopify is still connected.

Value reflection

Without a draft-first step, Shopify QA becomes a live-fire check on one-of-one inventory that is already public. Dropstitch lets you keep review inside a controlled pre-live flow, which reduces last-minute fixes and repeated storefront cleanup. Once the routine is set, any team member can follow the same review path.