What you can change on a published listing, and what you cannot.
A listing that is live is not frozen. Prices, photographs, descriptions and quantities can all be corrected without taking it down — but who may do it depends on your shop, and two things never change again.
Some shops are given publishing rights, which also carry the right to change a live listing. Look at the row in Items: if the pencil is there on a published item, you have them.
The title still links to the live item page, so you can always read your own listing as a buyer sees it, whether or not you can edit it.
The pencil reads Edit (live listing), and a yellow band at the top of the form says the same thing in more words: your changes go straight to the published page when you save.
So the save button reads Publish Changes rather than Save Changes. There is no draft to save into and no second step — pressing it puts the new version in front of buyers immediately.
Which means a half-finished edit is a half-finished public page. If you are rewriting a description, write it somewhere else and paste it in, rather than saving your way towards it.
The title and the item's web address are fixed for good once an item has been published, and the title field is greyed out to show it.
This is not only while it is live. Unpublishing does not release it — an item that has ever been published keeps its title and its address permanently, because the address may already have been shared, saved or linked to. If one of them is genuinely wrong, ask us; an administrator can still change them.
Everything else is yours: category, both prices, quantities, currency, language, the summary, the materials, the keywords, the shipping profile, the photographs, the thumbnail and the video.
A price rise on something already in carts is not a trap you are setting deliberately, but it is one a buyer can feel. If you are raising a price substantially, it is worth doing it when nothing is pending rather than mid-week.
With publishing rights, the same row carries Unpublish Item. It asks you to confirm, and then the listing stops being visible to buyers — it is not deleted, and everything on it is kept.
It is refused while an offer on the item is still live — waiting for an answer, or accepted and waiting to be paid. The dialog tells you, and the button stays disabled until those windows close. Nothing is lost by waiting: an unanswered offer expires within a day.
Unpublishing is also how a shop without live-editing rights gets back to a full edit: down, change, up again. What it does not restore is the title or the address.
A published item cannot be deleted at all, by anyone, from this page. Unpublish it first — and even then it can only be deleted if nobody has ordered it, saved it to their favourites or mentioned it in a message.
If you are told the item can no longer be edited, an administrator has published it while your form was open. Close it, let the list refresh, and open it again — your rights have not changed, the item's state has.
Why an item may not be visible