The staging tray

This lesson prepares you to: Stage the right products before a show and know the one limit and the one ordering quirk.

Staging is a shortlist, not a broadcast

Staging a product adds it to the tray for that stream. Nothing is sent to viewers. No event fires, no card appears, nothing changes on anybody's screen.

It is your running order, prepared before you go on. Pinning is the thing that broadcasts, and that is lesson 8.4.

Fifty, and what qualifies

You can stage 50 products per show. Past that you get You have staged the maximum number of products.

A product can only be staged if all four of these are true:

• The product is active.
• Its moderation is approved.
• Your shop is active.
• You own it.

That is the same test a shopper's view applies, so if a product is not visible in your shop it cannot be staged either. A draft or a pending listing will simply refuse.

Staging twice is harmless

Staging a product that is already staged does nothing and reports success. You cannot accidentally double up, and a flaky connection retrying will not create duplicates.

The ordering quirk

The tray sorts pinned items first, then by a sort order, then by when you staged them.

Here is the rough edge. A product's sort order is set to the number of items already in the tray at the moment you stage it. Remove something and stage something else, and the new item takes a position number that another item already has. There is no endpoint to reorder the tray, so once it is muddled the only fix is to clear and restage.

Practical advice: stage in the order you intend to sell, in one pass, before the show. Adding and removing during a broadcast will scramble the order you set up.

Unstaging

Removing a staged product takes it out of the tray. If it was pinned at the time, viewers are told it is unpinned, so removing something mid show does clean up after itself on screen.