Product Approval

In some cases, merchants may want to review and explicitly approve product information when it meets the quality requirements. To this end, Intershop Commerce Management facilitates an optional product approval process.

With respect to product approval, the following details are essential:

  • The product approval can be enabled/disabled on channel level. With the product approval disabled, the approval status information and the manual approval functionality are hidden.

  • The approval status does not affect the visibility of products in the storefront.

  • There are three approval statuses: "Edit", "In Review" and "Approved".

    Table 1. Approval statuses
    Status Description
    Edit The product is being (or is waiting to be) edited.
    In Review The product data is complete and ready to be reviewed.
    Approved The product is reviewed.

  • With the product approval enabled, two access privileges come into play: product approver and catalog & product manager.

    Table 2. Product-approval-related access privileges
    Access Privilege Product Approval Responsibility
    Product approver Product approvers are responsible for managing and approving the product data. They can set the following approval statuses: from "In Review" to "Approved" or "Edit", as well as from "Approved" to "Edit".
    Catalog & Product manager Catalog & product managers are responsible for editing the product information ("data enrichment"). They can set the approval status from "Edit" to "In Review" and vice versa, but they do not have the right to approve product data nor to set approved products back to editing.

    Basically, this allows for the following approach:

    • The two actors (depending on the current approval status) can request product data modifications in case they identify missing or incorrect data.

    • Catalog & product managers then edit the data accordingly and request approval.

    • Product approvers review and approve the data.

Note: Creating or importing new products after the product approval has already been enabled requires updating the corresponding database records. To this end, Intershop Commerce Management provides the preconfigured job "General Product Approval". Ask the system administrator of your Intershop Commerce Management system to schedule or run this job.

For details about product approval settings, see Enabling Product Approval.

For details about the product approval procedure, see Managing Product Approvals.