Stop selling products automatically on a legal cutoff date

Picture a new rule that takes effect at midnight. A rule change gave a multi-brand retailer a hard date after which certain product lines could no longer be sold.

Unpublishing hundreds of products by hand at midnight risks mistakes and loses search rankings. Forgetting one product is a legal risk.

Before the cutoff:

1. 01Everything runs in the store’s own theme. There is no separate server or database.
2. 02One script holds a small settings block: an on/off switch, the cutoff time and the preview option.
3. 03The cutoff time includes its time zone, so the lock happens at the same moment for every visitor, whatever their own clock says.
4. 04BigCommerce loads parts of the page after the first render, so the script watches the page and applies the lock to new content as it appears.
5. 05An early version froze category pages. The lock changed the page, which triggered the watcher, which ran the lock again, in a loop. The fix makes each change only once and groups bursts of page changes into one pass.

The pattern works for any time-boxed sale, recall or legal cutoff: a countdown, notices that change at a set time, buying controls that remove themselves, a preview link, and a page watcher that cannot loop.

What changes per store: which products are covered, the date and the wording.