You may not want to display a product in your storefront catalog immediately. Instead, you can set either start/end dates to determine a duration in which the product is active (in case you want to remove it from the catalog after a certain period of time as well) or a "first available date" from which point the product will be active indefinitely.
Active Dates
Scheduling products to be available during a specific duration is useful when products are limited time offers, when you are promoting product bundles or collections during a holiday or other event, or even preparing products for future availability by setting the start date in the future. Scheduling is simple, and only requires the product's Status to be set to "Scheduled" with the Active Start Date and optional Active End Date selected.
This start date and end date is the duration during which the product is visible and searchable on Storefront. (With the start and end dates being included in the duration.) Outside of this time frame, scheduled products do not appear in search results and are not listed in the catalog or category pages.
Though publishing scheduled products works the same way as Active products (see Step #14 of the previous section), Kibo recommends that scheduled products be published before or on their Start Date to take maximum advantage of the duration.
The Active End Date should be later than the Active Start Date. If you have also set a First Available Date for the product, the First Available Date must come before the scheduled Active End Date.
If no Active End Date is provided, then the scheduled product will be treated as a regular Active product once its Active Start Date is reached—it will remain available indefinitely until you edit the product to add an Active End Date or disable it.
First Available Date
The First Available Date field allows you to specify the date the product either becomes or became first available in the specific catalog. If you do not specify a value for this field, Kibo eCommerce defaults the value of this field to the date when you add the product to a catalog.
Kibo eCommerce uses the value of this field to calculate the number of days the product has been in the catalog. You can then use this value in the Days available in catalog dynamic category expression field to target products that have been in your catalog for a specific number of days. Refer to Dynamic Category Expression Fields for more information about using the Days available in catalog field in a dynamic category expression.