What Shopify shows you.
Shopify's help pages describe three separate records: an activity log of actions, a stock adjustment history for inventory, and a timeline on discounts. None of them is a field-by-field history of a product.
The activity log tells you an action happened. Its help page describes each entry as a date, a time, an action and a name, and says the log is view-only, cannot be exported and shows at most 250 results. It does not describe old and new values.
What Actorly records for a product.
Title, description, status, vendor, type, tags, handle, SEO, category, publish state, options and images are recorded, with the value before and after each change. Variants are recorded separately, so a price change shows on its own rather than as a change to the whole product.
Shopify tells Actorly when a product changes, and Actorly reads the record again to capture exactly what changed. Search covers the change summary, the item's name, field names and values.
Who changed a product.
For product changes Actorly shows who made the change when Shopify reports it, always beside how sure it is: Likely, Possible or Unknown. It lines each product change up with an entry in Shopify's activity log for the same record, within 90 seconds. A clear match shows a name and a confidence word. No clear match shows Unknown.
Where Shopify reports no one, the answer is Unknown, and Unknown is never replaced by a later guess. The match is a correlation by record and time, and Actorly shows it as one.
Putting a product field back.
Actorly can put back a product's title, status, vendor, product type, description, theme template or tags, one field at a time. It checks the field first, asks you to confirm the exact value, writes it, then asks Shopify again to confirm the value took. Putting a product's status back is a Restore plan feature; the other six fields can use the free plan's one restore a month.
Restoring tags overwrites the whole tag list, and Actorly shows which current tags would be removed before you confirm. If someone edited the field since you opened the restore, Actorly stops rather than overwrite a change you have not seen.
What it does not do.
- It does not show what a product said before Actorly was installed.
- It is not a copy of your store: it keeps changes, not a snapshot of every product.
- It does not bring a deleted product back. Deleted items are kept and shown in a Deleted view; they are not recreated.
- It has no bulk restore and no restore to a date.
Seeing is free. Actorly Watch costs $0 and keeps three months of change history and one restore a month. Actorly Restore is $29 a month or $240 a year, with unlimited history while you stay on Restore, unlimited single-field restores and export. Shopify bills it on your usual invoice, never per change. There is no trial: Watch is the free plan, with no clock. See pricing.
Questions.
Does Shopify keep a history of product changes?
Not as a page of fields before and after. Shopify's help pages describe an activity log of actions and narrower records such as stock adjustment history. The guide Does Shopify keep a history of product changes? goes through each.
Can I see who changed a product?
Sometimes. When Shopify reports it, Actorly shows the name beside Likely or Possible. Where it does not, Actorly says Unknown. Shopify's own activity log may also name the person, app or channel; how to see who changed a product shows where.
Can I see a product's history from before I installed Actorly?
The record starts the day Actorly is installed. It cannot show what your store looked like before that.
Which product fields are recorded?
Title, description, status, vendor, type, tags, handle, SEO, category, publish state, options and images. Variants are recorded separately.
Can I put a product back the way it was?
One field at a time, for seven product fields: title, status, vendor, product type, description, theme template and tags. The docs show how a restore runs.
How long is history kept?
Actorly Watch keeps three months (90 days) of change history. Actorly Restore keeps history for as long as the store stays on Restore and Actorly stays installed. If a store moves from Restore to Watch, history older than 90 days is deleted after a 14-day notice, and upgrading again does not bring it back.