Schedule Categories
Scheduled categories are useful for special promotions like flash sales, and seasonal offerings.
You can schedule a category to be online on a specific date and for a specific date range. For example, you can create, configure, and schedule a flash sale category on a staging instance, and then replicate the catalog to production for the sale date. On the scheduled date and time, the flash sale category becomes immediately accessible to customers in the storefront.
You can specify a category schedule by:
- No date range
- A start date only
- An end date only
- A start and end date
The category and associated products show in your storefront during the scheduled time only. Category scheduling works as follows:
| A category with the online flag set to... | Is always... |
|---|---|
| false | offline |
| true and without a date range | online |
| true and the current date is within the category's date range | currently online |
| true and the current date isn't within the category's date range | currently offline |
- Site-specific impact–The start and end dates of a category are not site-specific. If a category is online, it is online for all the sites that use its catalog. Subcategories don't inherit dates from ancestor categories.
- Search impact–Products assigned to offline categories are not returned in search results. The online/offline status of categories regarding search results requires that you rebuild the product index.