Drafts, holiday mode, sold-out pieces and pieces still being checked.
An item you can see in your own Items list is not necessarily one a buyer can find. Everything below is a reason a listing is missing from the catalogue, in the order worth checking.
The Published column says Yes or No, and No is the whole answer: an unpublished item appears nowhere at all — no search, no category, no shop page. It is not hidden or ranked low; it does not exist to buyers.
The Draft tab shows everything in that state at once, and Ready to be published the ones you have marked finished and are waiting on us for. If an item has no photographs yet, that is usually why it is not live.
When as many have sold as your Max Number allows, the listing stops being buyable. It still appears, marked as sold out, and the price is struck through — but nobody can order it.
If you have more of them, raising Max Number puts it back on sale immediately. If you left Max Number empty, an item can never sell out, so this is not your reason.
Vacation mode does not hide anything. Your items stay listed and stay searchable, each with an On vacation badge, and buying is disabled until you come back.
So if buyers can see an item but tell you they cannot buy it, check this before anything else.
Every listing has a period during which it is offered, and it runs for 90 days from the day the item was created — not from the day it was published. Publishing does not restart it.
This is the reason that catches people out, because there is nothing on the page to see. The Published column still says Yes, nothing looks wrong in your list, and the item has simply stopped appearing to buyers. If a listing has been up for a while and has quietly gone, this is almost certainly why — write to us and we can put it back.
It also means an item created long before it was published gets less time live than you would expect. Your list flags anything closing within 30 days with an Expiring tag, and we can extend a listing by another 90 days — so tell us before it runs out rather than after.
Two things sellers reasonably assume and which do not affect visibility at all:
Artmire's search box matches the letters typed against your title, your summary, your materials, your keywords and any translation of your listing. It is a plain match, not a clever one:
So the words a buyer would actually type belong in the title and the description, in the buyer's own words rather than the trade's — and the alternatives they might type instead belong in Keywords, which is exactly what that field is for.
The surest test is to look at the item as a buyer would. Preview shows an unpublished item exactly as its page will read; once it is published, the title in your list becomes a link straight to the real page.
If the page opens and looks right but the item still does not appear in searches or categories, one of the four reasons above is the cause — and if none of them fits, write to us with the item's name.