Catalogue statuses

A product and each of its variants carry their own catalogue status, set independently. Any status can be set at any time, in either direction — there is no enforced order.

Product status

Status	What it means	What it changes
Draft	The product isn't ready for normal use yet.	Nothing else — it's a label for your own filtering and reporting.
Active	The product is in normal use.	Nothing else.
Archived	You've marked the product as no longer wanted, without deleting it.	Nothing else on the product record itself. This is a different thing from archiving the product, which soft-deletes it — see product types and lifecycle.
Discontinued	The product is being phased out.	Nothing else.

Variant status

Status	What it means	What it changes
Draft	The variant isn't ready for normal use yet.	Nothing else — it's a label for your own filtering and reporting.
Active	The variant is in normal use.	Nothing else.
Archived	You've marked the variant as no longer wanted, without deleting it.	Excludes the variant from being included whenever its product is published or re-published to a sales channel. If every variant on a product is Archived, publishing the product fails — the error returned is "Product not found", which is misleading; the real reason is that there was nothing eligible to publish.
Discontinued	The variant is being phased out.	Nothing else.

Archived status versus archiving

Setting status to Archived is just a badge — except on a variant, where it also excludes the variant from being included whenever its product is published, or re-published, to a sales channel. Archiving a product or a variant is a separate action: it soft-deletes the record — the record and its history are kept, but it stops appearing in normal catalogue views and is recorded as a deletion. The two are independent: a record can be soft-deleted without ever having had its status set to Archived, or its status can be Archived without ever having been soft-deleted. See product types and lifecycle for the full picture.