Going live

Why publishing is not the same as being reachable, and how to take the shop off the web again.

Publishing and being reachable are two different things.

Publish makes the current designer draft the live version. It is about your content.
Being reachable is about whether visitors get the shop or a 404. It is about payments and legal texts.

What a shop needs before visitors can reach it

Both of these, at the same time:

Checkout is possible

At least one payment method switched on under Settings → Payment Methods, and your Stripe account verified and able to accept charges.

Stripe's completed verification is the platform's one identity check before a shop may sell — so until it is done, customers cannot pay at all, including by invoice or cash.

All five legal texts are filled in

Under Settings → Legal & Compliance: terms, privacy, imprint, cookie policy and the right of withdrawal. The checkout links the withdrawal page next to the order button.

A text that still contains a placeholder such as [PLACEHOLDER] counts as missing. The Legal tab names the placeholders underneath the text.

Until then visitors get a 404 — while your dashboard and your own Preview keep working normally. The Overview page shows a yellow warning naming exactly what is missing, with links to the settings and to your preview.

The usual cause of a shop that "published but is not online" is a legal text the AI drafted with a placeholder still in it. Fill in Settings → Address completely and let the AI improve the text again, or replace the bracket by hand.

Taking the shop off the web

Once something has been published, a green Online button sits at the end of the designer toolbar. Clicking it takes the published shop off the web again:

Visitors get a 404.
Your dashboard and your own preview keep working.
Nothing is deleted — products, orders, design and settings all stay.

The button then disappears. Publish is what puts the shop back online.

What happens automatically once you are online

No setup needed for any of this:

A sitemap at /sitemap.xml, listing exactly the pages and products the storefront shows the public.
Structured data: OnlineStore on the landing page, Product with price and availability on every product page — what makes rich results possible in search.
Two product feeds: /google-shopping.xml for Google Merchant Center and /meta-catalog.xml for Meta Commerce Manager.
An llms.txt at /llms.txt: the shop in plain text for AI assistants — products with prices and links, pages, shipping and legal texts.

Slug-hosted shops are listed in the platform's own robots.txt so search engines find them. A verified custom domain serves its sitemap and its own robots.txt at its root. See SEO and feeds.

Your shop's address

Without a custom domain your shop lives at /your-shop-slug. Product pages are at /your-shop-slug/product/<product-slug> — readable and SEO-friendly. A product's slug is taken from its name when it is created, and you can change it later in the product form — it has to be unique within your shop. Links that still carry the old slug stop working.

With a verified custom domain the same storefront is served at the domain root, without the slug, and links that still carry the slug are permanently redirected to the slugless address.