398 of 692 Products Were Published in One Afternoon. Zero Were Created in 90 Days

A visa agency in Bali runs an automated tool that profiles Shopify stores. The shop profiles return data such as the merchant's details, social media links, storefront theme, apps, product catalog size, and price range. The primary goal is to determine if a store is still active, which can be assessed by examining two specific fields in the shop profile: 'created_at' and 'published_at'.

The author accessed the /products.json file from four Shopify stores and counted products in two ways: how many were created in the last 90 days and how many were published in the last 90 days. All five stores showcased more recent publishing than creation within the specified timeframe. For instance, Allbirds.com had 692 products in total, but only 0 products created in the last 90 days and 404 published in the same period.

By sorting the products by the 'published_at' field, it was observed that 398 out of 692 products in the sample had a 'published_at' date within one afternoon, starting from 14:51:05 and ending at 16:58:13 on September 25, 2026.

This revelation highlights that 'published_at' does not indicate the actual creation of the product, and the information is not displayed in the product data payload. The author suggests that using 'published_at' as a freshness metric is misleading, as it can show a store as highly active when, in reality, it has not added new products in the given timeframe.

The 'created_at' field, on the other hand, remains unchanged regardless of re-publishing, channel changes, or theme migrations, making it a more accurate measure of a product's creation date.