I was suprised not to find a feature to publish products/variants on a specific date. Isn’t there a feature for this? I assumed that there would be a similar feature like the one to publish pages?
My workaround would be to create a scheduled job and evaluate/filter products with a DateTime field.
This feature is planned for our November release (8.13). It will be based on activation dates for variants and categories. Products, variants and categories will still not have a draft, like pages in CMS.
Unfortunately we had to do late changes in this feature leading to that it could not be released in 8.13. It is planned for version 8.14 that is released in January.