Product Scheduling

Product scheduling is essential for coordinated product launches, seasonal releases, and time-sensitive promotions. Rather than making products available immediately, ecommerce managers and developers can control exactly when items go live on their website.

Tweakwise supports several approaches to achieve this, each with different trade-offs between simplicity and precision.

The most commonly used options are:

• Schedule in the source system/PIM/CMS
  • Article gets an online_from / publish_at date.
  • The feed generator only includes articles where the date has been reached.
  • Advantage: Tweakwise doesn't have to "wait"; the article only enters the feed when it's actually live.
• Import earlier, but don't show at runtime with a visibility attribute
  • You can already include the article in Tweakwise, but with your own attribute such as visible=false.
  • Then have your frontend or export respect this with a request parameter.
  • This works especially well if you can keep the generation to publication cycle within an acceptable window.
• Import earlier, but don't show at runtime with a date attribute
  • You can already include the article in Tweakwise, but with your own attribute such as online_from (datetime).
  • Then have your frontend or export respect this with a request parameter where you work with all products between date1 and date2. So online_from=199901010000-202608071200 (until today 12pm)
  • This works especially well if your cycle is too long, but the solution is more complex and harder to maintain/debug.
• API-based incremental update around the exact moment
  • If you want to schedule more precisely, the Backend API is more suitable than waiting for feed regeneration.
  • You can already include the article in Tweakwise, but with your own attribute such as visible=false.
  • Around the scheduled time you can update the article's status to true. Then you run the publication.
  • This works especially well if the publication duration is within an acceptable window.

There is no best choice here; it mainly depends on how acceptable the sync-gap is.