# What a storefront product is

A storefront product is one of your items with a public page written for it, and a switch that decides whether a shopper ever sees it.

A product on the storefront is not a separate record. It is one of the items your business already holds, with the public half filled in: a description a shopper reads, images, search wording, and a switch that puts the page live.

![The Products list filtered to goods, showing 44 Total Amount, 30 Published, 14 Drafts and 1 Low stock above the table. Rows carry a thumbnail, the product name with its SKU underneath, a Published or Draft badge, a stock figure, a category, the product type and the manufacturer.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/storefront/products/products-list.png)

*The whole catalogue, published and draft together, with the four counts above it.*

## What the Products list shows

Everything in your catalogue appears here, published or not, so the list is the one place to see both states side by side. Four counts sit above it.

- **Total Amount**: Every product in the catalogue, whatever its state.
- **Published**: Products with a live page on the storefront.
- **Drafts**: Products with the publish switch off. They exist, but no shopper can reach them.
- **Low stock**: Published products that have run low or run out, so you can deal with them before a shopper finds an empty page.

## Goods and services

Both can be published. A service has no stock to track, so the Inventory card is quieter on it, but it takes the same description, images, tags and search listing as anything else. Plenty of catalogues publish only the goods and leave the services as drafts; nothing in Storefront prefers one over the other.

## Products with options

A product a shopper chooses between, such as a hose in three bores and two lengths, is a parent with a variant underneath for each combination.

- **The parent**: Carries the title, the description and the images the whole family shares. The Inventory column shows how many variants it has rather than a stock figure.
- **Each variant**: A product in its own right, with its own SKU, price, stock, image and page. It is the thing a shopper actually buys.

Because a variant is a full product, it has its own row, its own page and its own place in a collection. A rule that matches it pulls in that variant, not its parent.

## What the publish switch does

- **Turning it on**: Gives the product a public page, makes it findable, and lets it join any collection whose rules it matches.
- **Turning it off**: Withdraws the page. Nothing is deleted, no stock moves, and the item carries on working everywhere else in the business.

> **Note:**
>
> Publishing and permissions are different things. A product missing from the storefront when you can see it in the list is a draft, not a role problem.