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Promote staging drafts to production

Copy reviewed product drafts and family FAQs from a staging storefront to the production storefront of the same account, as drafts only, and handle the products that do not match.

4 min readintermediateUpdated November 3, 2026

Many stores keep a staging copy where content is reviewed before it reaches customers. Promote Drafts copies the drafts you reviewed on the staging storefront onto the production storefront, so you do not retype them. It copies drafts only. Nothing on the production store changes until someone publishes.

Before you start

  • Both storefronts must be connected to the same Forge account and be active, for example a WooCommerce staging site and the production site.
  • The drafts you want to move must exist on the staging storefront and should already be reviewed there. Promotion copies the latest saved product draft for each product.
  • The production storefront needs its own synced catalog, so Forge knows which products exist there. Forge only writes drafts to products it can find in the target catalog. It never creates a product from a staging row.
  • You need permission to publish. Operators who can only edit drafts do not see the page.

Promote the drafts

  1. Open the Promote Drafts page under Products, at the address ending /aeo/<storefront>/products/promote.
  2. In Source Storefront, choose staging.
  3. In Target Storefront, choose production. The two must differ.
  4. Optional: under Optional Family Filter, tick the families to move. Leave it empty to move every product that has a draft.
  5. Select Promote Drafts.
  6. Read the summary: Copied N Product Drafts · N Family FAQs.

The family filter lists confirmed parent families of the source storefront. See Group products into families for how those are made.

How products are matched

Forge matches by exact identity and does not guess:

  1. External ID first. A staging product and a production product with the same store ID are a match.
  2. SKU second. If no ID matches, Forge looks for the same SKU, ignoring capitalization.
  3. A match must be unique. If a SKU appears on more than one target product, or on none, the product is left unmatched.

Family FAQs follow the same rule. A source family is matched to a confirmed production family with the same family key. If none has it, Forge looks for a family whose member SKUs are exactly the same set. A family that does not match one family is listed as unmatched.

For each match, Forge creates a new draft version on the production product. It carries the fields, FAQ items, and specifications from staging. Earlier production versions are kept.

Work through the unmatched list

Below the summary, the table Unmatched Product or Family lists each product or family that was not copied, with its SKU and Source Identity. Nothing about them is lost on the staging side.

  1. Compare the SKU with the production store. The most common cause is a SKU that differs by a typo, a trailing space, or a different format.
  2. Fix the SKU on the store (staging or production, whichever is wrong).
  3. Re-sync the catalog for that storefront so Forge sees the change. On the families page, Sync Catalog & Refresh does this for the active storefront.
  4. Run Promote Drafts again. Choose the family filter to limit the run to the affected families.
  5. For a family that is unmatched because the production family is not yet confirmed, confirm it on production first, then promote again.

A re-run is safe. It adds another draft version to products that matched before, and it does not publish anything.

Publishing is a separate step

After promotion, switch to the production storefront and review the copied drafts as you would any others, using Draft and review product content. Check the product facts again, because a draft that was right on staging may name a variant that production does not stock.

When you are satisfied, publish from Manage Bulk Drafts, one product at a time or by family or category. Publication is a deliberate action by a person with administrator permission. Promotion alone never changes the live store.

Troubleshooting

The target does not appear. Only active storefronts of the current account are listed. Check Settings > Connections.

Copied 0 Product Drafts. The source has no saved drafts for the selected products, or none matched. Open the unmatched table first, then check the source drafts.

A product matched the wrong item. Forge only matches on an exact ID or SKU. Correct the SKU data on the store and re-sync.

Your work is done when the unmatched list is empty or understood, the production drafts read correctly, and you have decided separately when to publish them.