Product Launch Playbook

Open Media Library → Add New File/s. This is the first step — not the product form — because the product form's image picker pulls from the library. Photos that do not exist in the library cannot be selected from the product form.

Drag all product photos onto the drop zone in a single pass. Before clicking Upload Files, set two options that will affect how fast the photos load on the public product page:

• Convert to WebP: tick on. WebP files are roughly 30% smaller than equivalent JPGs with no visible quality difference on modern browsers.
• Compress: set to Medium. This brings a typical studio-shot product image from 2–4 MB down to under 200 KB without visible loss at normal screen resolutions.

For the your business Single-Origin Subscription launch, upload these three files:

• subscription-box-hero.jpg — the main product shot (1200 × 900 px). This becomes the featured image on the product page, the product card on /products, and the image shown in cart and on order receipts.
• subscription-unboxed-detail.jpg — a lifestyle close-up of the box opened, showing the bag of beans inside. Goes into the product gallery.
• subscription-label.jpg — a tight shot of the label with the origin name and roast date. Goes into the product gallery.

Once the upload batch completes, all three photos appear in the library grid. Hover over each to confirm the thumbnail renders correctly and the file size is under 300 KB per image. If any file shows a size above 300 KB, delete it from the library (click the row's trash icon), re-export it at a lower quality setting, and re-upload.

You do not need to copy the image URLs. The product form's image picker searches your library by filename — the photos will be findable by name when you open the Images tab in Step 2.

Open Ecommerce → Products → Add New Product and select Simple Product from the product type selector at the top of the form.

The product form has multiple tabs. Fill in all relevant tabs before saving — saving and coming back to add the images later requires an additional round-trip. Here is what to fill in for the your business Single-Origin Subscription:

General tab:

• Title: your business Single-Origin Subscription — 3 Months
• Description: Write 150–300 words describing what the subscriber receives, where the beans are sourced, how often they ship, and what makes this subscription different from a one-off bag. This text renders on the public product page below the price and Add to Cart button.
• Short Description: One or two sentences for the product card on the /products listing page.
• Regular Price: 89.00
• SKU: ACM-SUB-3M
• Stock quantity: 100
• Manage stock: on — SGEN tracks inventory and prevents add-to-cart once stock reaches zero, so the "first 100 subscribers" promise in the popup is automatically enforced.

Images tab:

Open the image picker and select subscription-box-hero.jpg as the Featured Image. Then add subscription-unboxed-detail.jpg and subscription-label.jpg to the Gallery section. The gallery images appear as thumbnails below the featured image on the public product page — visitors can click each to view it full-size.

Tags:

Add subscription, coffee, new. Tags are used in the blog announcement post and can be referenced in future category filtering.

Status:

Set to Draft. The product will be invisible on /products until you flip it to Publish at T-0. Saving as Draft now lets you review the product page in the admin preview without it going live prematurely.

Here is what the completed product form looks like before saving:

After saving, confirm the record appears in your Ecommerce → Products list with a Draft status badge. If it shows Published, open the record, set Status to Draft, and save again before proceeding.

Open Popups → Add New. The announcement popup fires automatically on every visitor's first page view during the launch week and communicates the first-month-free offer. It should be simple — a heading, two lines of body copy, and a single call-to-action link to the product page. Anything longer than that and visitors dismiss without reading.

Fill in the Add New form:

• Title: Subscription Launch — First Month Free

This is the admin-only label. Visitors never see it — it only appears in the Popups list in your admin. Make it descriptive enough that you can identify this popup six months from now without opening it.

• Editor: Text Editor (the default). SG-Builder is available for visually complex popups, but for a launch popup with a heading, two lines of copy, and a link, Text Editor is faster and easier to update.

• Content: Write the popup body. Keep it under 60 words. Visitors have about three seconds before they reach for the close button.

`` <h2>Try our 3-month subscription</h2> <p>Be one of the first 100 subscribers and your first month is on us. Freshly roasted single-origin coffee, delivered every four weeks.</p> <a href="/products/acme-single-origin-subscription-3-months">Claim your spot →</a> ``

• Autoload: tick on. The popup fires on the visitor's first page view on any page of the site. If you leave Autoload off, the popup only fires when a visitor clicks a trigger button — which is the right choice for age gates and opt-in modals, but not for a launch announcement.

• Popup Width: 520. Wide enough to be readable; narrow enough not to swamp the page content behind it.

• Status: Draft. Flip to Published at T-0.

Coupon note: if you are attaching a launch coupon code (for example, LAUNCH25), SGEN coupons are cart-wide. The code discounts the customer's entire cart subtotal, not just the subscription line item. Write your popup copy to reflect this: "Apply LAUNCH25 at checkout for $25 off your order" — not "get $25 off the subscription." A customer who adds a Canvas Tote Bag alongside the subscription will see $25 off the combined total, not just off the $89.00 subscription. If that is not your intent, express the launch offer as a narrative promise in the popup body rather than a coupon code.

Here is the completed Add New Popup form for the your business launch:

Save as Draft. Confirm the popup appears in your Popups list with status Draft. You now have both the product and the popup built and invisible — both flip to Published at T-0.

Open Custom Codes → Add New. The Custom Codes area is where you load the Google Tag Manager container snippet onto every public page. GTM then manages the individual event tags (product_view, add_to_cart, purchase) inside its own workspace — SGEN Custom Codes carries only the loader.

Create one snippet with these settings:

• Name: GTM Container — your business
• Placement: </body> — End
• Status: Active

The </body> — End placement is important. GTM loads asynchronously, but placing it at the end of the body ensures the DOM is ready before any GTM triggers fire. Placing the loader in <head> can cause triggers that depend on DOM elements (such as a click on the Add to Cart button) to fail silently.

Paste the GTM container snippet into the Code field. Replace GTM-XXXXXXX with your real container ID:

<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<template data-safe="script" data-attrs="">(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src=
'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-XXXXXXX');</template>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager -->

Save the snippet. The GTM container is now live on every public page — but no events fire yet because you have not configured the tags inside GTM. Inside your GTM workspace, create three Custom HTML tags with the following dataLayer pushes. Trigger each on the condition shown in the comment:

After saving all three tags, publish the GTM container workspace. Open your public homepage in a separate browser tab, right-click → View page source, and search for GTM- — the loader should appear near the bottom of the page, just before </body>. If the loader is missing, return to Custom Codes and confirm the snippet Status is Active and the placement is </body> — End.

Open Blog → Add New Post. Write the announcement post now — two days before launch — so you have time to revise the copy before it goes live. Save as a Draft at the end of this step; you will flip it to Published at T-0 alongside the product and popup.

Recommended structure for the your business announcement post:

• Title: Why We Built the your business Single-Origin Subscription
• Categories: News, Products
• Tags: subscription, coffee, launch
• Featured image: subscription-box-hero.jpg — already in Media Library from T-7. Open the Featured Image picker and select it by filename.
• Body: 400–600 words. Three suggested sections: (1) the problem — subscribers who want consistently great single-origin coffee but do not want to think about reordering; (2) what is in the box — one origin per month, three months, roasted and shipped within 48 hours of the order; (3) the offer — first 100 subscribers get their first month on the house.

End the post with a clear call-to-action button or text link to the product page. Readers who finish the post are your warmest audience — make the next step obvious.

Set Status to Draft and save. On T-0, open the post, confirm the copy is exactly as you want it, and flip Status to Publish. The post goes live on your blog archive immediately and is indexable by search engines from that moment.

Open Form Integrations and locate the form connected to your launch signup or order flow. On the integrations list for that form, confirm:

1. At least one destination is Enabled.
2. The primary destination (Mailchimp, Airtable, or webhook) is at Order 1.
3. No destination in the Enabled state has a stale API token — if a destination was configured months ago with a token that has since been rotated, it will appear Enabled but fail silently on submission.

Active development caveat: The per-destination add and edit path in Form Integrations is currently in active development. You can view the list and confirm the current state of each destination, but adding a new email destination from scratch or editing an existing destination's configuration may not behave reliably on this version. A follow-up guide will cover those paths once they are stable. For this launch, treat the integrations list as read-only and use SGEN's admin notification (Settings → Email → New Order) as your primary real-time order alert.

Here is what a well-configured integrations list looks like for the your business newsletter sign-up form — the form embedded in the launch popup — with two active destinations and one paused channel:

The Slack channel is Disabled here — that is fine if the team decided Slack notifications are not needed for the launch. The critical thing is that Mailchimp is at Order 1, Enabled, with Stop on Success set to Yes. That means every newsletter sign-up via the popup goes to Mailchimp first; if Mailchimp accepts it, Airtable still fires (Stop on Success does not apply to Airtable here because SoS is set on Mailchimp's row, not Airtable's). The Slack channel is skipped entirely since it is Disabled.

If any destination that you need for launch shows Disabled, re-enable it now. One day before T-0 is the right time to find and fix this — not on launch morning.

Launch day. Do the three status flips in this exact order — product first, blog post second, popup third. The reason for the order: the popup contains a link to the product page. If the popup goes live before the product is Published, the first visitors who click the popup CTA land on a 404. Flip the product first so the destination page exists before any visitors are directed to it.

Step 7a — Publish the product.

Open Ecommerce → Products, find the your business Single-Origin Subscription row (status: Draft), and click Edit. Set Status to Publish and click Save Product. The product is now live on /products. Verify by opening a new browser tab and navigating to /products — the subscription card should appear in the product grid with its photo and price ($89.00).

Step 7b — Publish the blog post.

Open Blog, find the announcement post (status: Draft), and click Edit. Set Status to Publish and click Save Post. The post is now live on your blog archive. Verify by opening the blog archive in a new tab and confirming the post appears at the top of the list.

Step 7c — Publish the popup.

Open Popups, find the launch popup (status: Draft), and click Edit. Set Status to Publish and click Save Popup. The popup now fires for every first-time visitor on any page of your site.

Verify by opening your site in a private/incognito browser window — incognito resets the first-visit cookie, so the popup fires even if you have already seen it today. The overlay should appear within two seconds of the page loading. Click the CTA link inside the popup and confirm it reaches the product page.

Step 7d — Monitor the first orders.

Open Ecommerce → Orders and reload every few minutes. The orders list refreshes on reload. Here is what the first batch of orders looks like for the your business subscription launch:

Completed orders mean payment captured and the order is fulfilled. Pending orders mean payment is in process — this is normal for a few minutes after checkout. Flag any orders in Refunded or an unexpected error state for immediate follow-up.

Note order #1044: an analyst added the Canvas Tote Bag alongside the subscription. Her total is $119.00 ($89.00 + $30.00). If you issued a cart-wide coupon for the launch, it would have applied to her full $119.00 — not just the subscription.

The soft-launch to your email list is done. Expand to the full public audience on T+1 by posting on your social channels. Write the copy before T+1 so you can publish it immediately without composing under pressure on the day.

Suggested Instagram caption (fits within 2,200 characters; hashtags added below the caption):

The wait is over. Our Single-Origin Subscription is live — freshly roasted, shipped every four weeks for three months. First 100 subscribers get their first month on us. Link in bio to claim your spot. #coffeesubscription #singleorigin #freshroasted #acmecoffee

Suggested short-form post (suitable for any text-forward platform):

We launched our 3-month single-origin subscription at your business. Freshly roasted beans from one origin, delivered monthly. Sign up at yourdomain.com — link below.

No SGEN admin step is required for social publishing. This step is a reminder to post while the launch momentum is live and your first wave of email-list orders is coming in.

Three days after launch, run a structured review from three areas of your SGEN admin. This is not a post-mortem — it is a data collection pass so your team has a clear picture of the first 72 hours before the launch energy fades.

Ecommerce → Orders: Filter by the subscription product SKU (ACM-SUB-3M) or by the launch date range. Record: total orders placed, Completed vs Pending ratio, any Refunded orders (investigate each — a refund in the first 72 hours is usually a payment dispute or a duplicate order). If the stock counter shows fewer than 100 remaining, the popups "first 100 subscribers" promise is being honoured — when it hits 0, the product auto-removes the Add to Cart button.

Analytics → Event Logs: Confirm product_view, add_to_cart, and purchase are all recording with realistic counts. A healthy funnel shows more product_view events than add_to_cart events, and more add_to_cart events than purchase events. If purchase events are missing entirely, the GTM tag trigger URL may not match the order-confirmation page URL — revisit the GTM workspace and check the trigger condition.

Ecommerce → Orders → Export: Export the T-0 through T+3 orders as a CSV file for the team's records. Open Ecommerce → Orders, set the date filter to the launch range, and click Export. The CSV includes order number, customer name, product, total, and status — enough for a quick launch debrief spreadsheet.

Popup close-out: If the popup offered a limited quantity (first 100 subscribers) and you have reached 100 orders, flip the popup from Published back to Draft. Open Popups → Manage, find the launch popup, open it, set Status to Draft, and save. The popup stops appearing on your site immediately. You do not need to delete it — the Draft record stays in your list for reference.