Products

Meanings of Product States

You may wonder, what do these product states represent, why not just go with an is_active flag?

The answer is that in many ecommerce businesses products may go through different lifecycle stages, which need slightly different handling. Vanilo doesn't enforce any workflow for this, but here's the interpretation of the built-in states, and how they can possibly be handled:

State	Meaning	Common way of handling the state
draft	The product data is incomplete	Never display it on the StoreFront, do not allow it in any transaction, but allow editing in Admin
inactive	The product data is complete but has not been published yet	Hide from the StoreFront, eventually allow in transactions; eg. backorders, early closed-group sales, etc
active	The product is active	Make it available everywhere
unavailable	The product is temporarily unavailable; due to supplier issues, legal reasons, quality problems, production blockages or any other reason that prevents the product from being ordered and shipped	Display it on the StoreFront, but disallow new orders
retired	The product is permanently unavailable and will never come back to the product range	Do not list it on the StoreFront, but allow opening it when directly accessing its product link. Disallow new orders.