Type: Decision Guide / Complete Guide · Stage: Optimize / Scale · Topic: Markets / Promotions / Operations
On this page
Quick answer
Use Shopify Rollouts for coordinated, scheduled changes to your online store theme, checkout and customer accounts configuration, market catalogs, and existing discounts. It can launch changes permanently, run a temporary event that rolls back, or split traffic for an experiment. It is not a general-purpose job scheduler for every Shopify field. It does not bulk-edit product prices, set inventory quantities, rewrite Liquid templates, or run arbitrary GraphQL mutations on a timer.
Rollouts lives at Markets → Rollouts and is available on Basic and above; experiments require Grow or higher. Launchpad still has its own Plus-only event workflows. Treat them as overlapping tools, not identical replacements.
Why the old promotion playbook needs updating
Older Shopify Plus guides typically start in Apps → Launchpad, then schedule theme switches, product availability, price changes, inventory releases, or even Shopify Scripts. That advice describes a different control surface. Shopify introduced Rollouts in March 2026, expanded theme and checkout scheduling in June, redesigned the setup in September, and added discount changes in October 2026. Shopify Scripts themselves stopped executing on June 30, 2026, so a Launchpad-era plan that depends on Ruby Scripts cannot be reused unchanged.
The important distinction is what is being changed. A temporary theme treatment is a presentation change. Activating an existing discount is a discount-status change. Changing 10,000 variant prices is a catalog-data operation. Releasing 300 units of stock is an inventory operation. One calendar date does not make those operations interchangeable.
Choose the right Rollout type
| Type | What happens | Good use |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | Changes become permanent when applied. | New homepage, checkout configuration, or market catalog activation. |
| Event | Changes run for a defined period and then roll back. | Holiday theme, temporary promotional content, scheduled discount activation. |
| Experiment | Control and treatment split eligible traffic; Grow plan or higher. | Compare two checkout or theme experiences with measured results. |
These are not three unrelated features. Choosing an end date or traffic split can change how Shopify classifies the rollout. Review the actual start, end, audience, and end behavior before saving. A Launch is not a temporary preview with an automatic undo button.
What Rollouts can actually change
- Theme: customize the current main theme for a rollout, or replace it with another theme. The latter must already exist in Online Store. Theme-editor changes can be staged; Liquid template code changes are not Rollout changes.
- Checkout and customer accounts: replace the active configuration with one prepared in the checkout and accounts editor. A theme-only rollout does not magically deploy a checkout UI extension or app version.
- Market catalogs: set existing market catalogs to Active or Draft. This changes whether their configured prices and availability apply; it does not snapshot and restore the catalog’s individual prices. Company-location B2B catalogs cannot be added.
- Discounts: activate or deactivate existing discounts, including as part of a coordinated campaign. A discount can belong to only one unended rollout at a time, and a rollout can include up to 250 discounts. Discount dates, eligibility, and combination rules still matter.
Rollouts cannot edit arbitrary products or inventory, create discounts for you, execute theme GitHub deployments, schedule metafield writes, or replace an ERP synchronization job. For those, use the correct supported mechanism: native discount dates, a purpose-built app, Shopify Flow where a supported trigger/action exists, or an authenticated Admin API integration with scheduling, logging, and rollback planning.
Build a campaign without a midnight release call
Suppose a store needs a weekend sale with a new hero, a temporary checkout message, and a 15% offer. A safe implementation looks like this:
- Define each resource. Hero and messaging belong to theme or checkout configurations; the offer belongs to a discount. Do not implement the same percentage in both theme JavaScript and Shopify’s discount engine.
- Prepare the assets. Add the replacement theme or prepare the checkout configuration. Create and test the discount before scheduling it.
- Go to Markets → Rollouts → Create rollout. Choose Event for a temporary promotion. Give it a clear internal name.
- Add changes. Choose the theme change, checkout configuration, and existing discount activation. Check which markets are eligible; not every resource applies to every market.
- Set start/end times. Shopify uses the store timezone in Settings → General. Confirm the displayed time, especially across daylight-saving transitions and teams in different regions.
- Review conflicts and audience. Overlapping rollouts can conflict or share traffic. If the campaign must be identical for all shoppers, do not accidentally create a partial-traffic experiment.
- Save, preview, and test. Confirm the exact theme, checkout, discount eligibility, and market experience before the scheduled start.
Four operational traps
1. A catalog rollback is not a price-data rollback. If staff change catalog prices while an Event is active, ending the Event restores the catalog’s status, not its old prices. Treat catalog edits as independent releases.
2. A 50% experiment is not necessarily channel-wide. Rollout experiments and partial-traffic allocations apply to the online store. Ads, product feeds, headless storefronts, or POS can show a different offer. Shopify warns about these mismatches explicitly.
3. The discount’s own rules remain active. Rollout status interacts with discount dates, customer eligibility, and combinations. Never infer the final checkout result from the Rollout screen alone.
4. An active theme rollout affects publishing. Shopify can require you to archive unended rollouts before publishing another main theme or checkout configuration. Archiving a theme rollout discards its staged theme customizations; do not use Archive as an improvised pause button.
Common misunderstanding
“Rollouts replaced Launchpad, so it can schedule anything Launchpad did.” No. Rollouts is a newer native orchestration layer with its own supported resources. Launchpad remains documented as a Plus app and has different capabilities. Check the exact requirement rather than assuming feature parity.
“An Event will restore every setting to its old value.” No. Rollouts restore the changes they control, not unrelated product, catalog-content, inventory, app, or code edits made during the event.
How to test this
- In a development or low-risk market, create a short Event using a harmless theme message and an existing test discount.
- Verify preview behavior and the exact start/end time in the store timezone.
- Check an eligible cart, an ineligible cart, and a cart where another discount could combine.
- Inspect storefront and checkout in two markets, including any market where the offer should not apply.
- Confirm the campaign begins, and then confirm the theme/discount state after it ends.
- Test a scheduled theme publication conflict before relying on multiple concurrent releases.
- Document separately anything Rollouts did not control, such as inventory, product prices, or metafields.
Sources and further reading
- Shopify Help: Rollouts overview
- Shopify Help: Create a rollout
- Shopify Help: Requirements, supported surfaces, and limitations
- Shopify Help: Launch, Event, and Experiment
- Shopify Changelog: Discount changes added October 2, 2026
- Shopify Help: Launchpad event workflow (older Plus approach; not feature-identical)
Documentation reviewed October 13, 2026. This guide is about scheduling resources, not the separate developer problem of reading Rollout state through GraphQL.