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Product types and lifecycle

A product type is chosen once, when the product is created. A catalogue status — Draft, Active, Archived or Discontinued — is carried separately by the product and by every one of its variants, and can be changed at any time. These are two different things: type describes what kind of item it is; status describes where it is in its life.

Product type is fixed at creation​

Every product is created as one of five types — Physical, Digital, Made to order, Gift card or Service. Once the product exists, the type cannot be changed; the only way to change it is to archive the product and create a replacement with the type you want. See product types for the table of types and what the choice actually changes.

Status is independent on the product and on each variant​

A product carries its own catalogue status, and each of its variants carries its own — set separately, changed separately. A product can be Active while one of its variants is Discontinued and another is still Draft. Changing the product's status never changes a variant's status, and the other way round.

There is no enforced order between the four statuses. Any status can be set at any time, in either direction — moving a variant from Archived back to Active, for example, is not blocked.

Archived on a variant is not just a label​

For most statuses, on both the product and the variant, the honest answer is that a status is a label for your own filtering and reporting — see the catalogue statuses reference for the full table.

The one exception is Archived on a variant. A variant with status Archived is excluded whenever its product is published, or re-published, to a sales channel — Yessort simply leaves it out of what gets sent. If every variant on a product is set to Archived, there is nothing eligible to publish at all, and publishing the product fails. The error you get back is the unhelpful "Product not found" — the product is there, it's just that none of its variants qualified.

Archiving is a different action from the Archived status​

Yessort also lets you archive a product or a variant outright, from its kebab menu. This is not the same thing as setting its status to Archived — archiving is Yessort's delete: it stops the record appearing in normal catalogue views and it is recorded as a deletion. The record itself, and its history, are kept.

  • Archiving a product unpublishes every one of its variants from the sales channels they were listed on, so the product stops being for sale. It does not cascade to the variants' own statuses or delete them; they keep their own statuses so historical reports stay intact.
  • Archiving a variant is blocked while it still has stock on hand across every site and location — you're offered a write-off, with a required reason, as part of the same confirmation. Once archived, the variant is unpublished from any channel it was listed on. Its units of measure are kept, not deleted, so historical stock records stay queryable.

So a product or a variant can be both "Archived" (the status) and untouched by the delete action, or deleted without ever having had its status set to Archived, or both at once. They're independent choices — use precise wording rather than treating them as the same thing.