How Team Project Review Works: Employee Submit, Admin Approve

On a team account, not every sourced project should go live the moment one team member finishes building it. A review step — someone with oversight checking the work before it's final — is normal in any team process, and BulkFlow's team review workflow builds that in directly rather than relying on an informal "ping someone on WhatsApp before you export" habit.

How it actually works

An employee builds out a sourcing project — a batch of products, priced and reviewed on their end — and submits it for review instead of exporting it directly. An admin sees submitted projects in a dedicated Admin → Team Projects queue, reviews the actual sourced data (not just a summary), and approves or rejects it. A rejection can include the reason, so the employee knows specifically what needs fixing rather than guessing.

Why this needed to be a real feature, not an informal process

Informal review — "check with the team lead before you export" — relies on everyone remembering to do it, every time, which is exactly the kind of step that gets skipped under deadline pressure, which is also exactly when a mistake is most likely to slip through unreviewed. A workflow that structurally requires approval before a project can be marked ready removes that reliance on memory and discipline.

What this catches in practice

The kinds of errors a second set of eyes catches before export tend to be the quiet ones: a pricing mode set wrong on a handful of SKUs, a variant that didn't translate cleanly and reads oddly, a landed-cost assumption that looks fine individually but is off for that specific supplier's actual freight terms. None of these are necessarily visible to the person who built the project — they're used to looking at it, and familiarity is exactly what makes a second reviewer valuable.

Who this is for

Single-person accounts don't need this — there's no one else to review against. It matters specifically once a team has grown past one sourcer, which is also roughly when informal "just check with me first" review processes start breaking down from sheer volume, because the team lead can't realistically eyeball every batch informally once there are three or four people sourcing in parallel.

Related: Trusted Contacts and duplicate-link detection is the other half of making a growing sourcing team actually work smoothly together. Start free and set up team review once your account has more than one sourcer.

A concrete example of what review actually catches

A team member sources and prices a 25-product batch, confident it's ready. During review, the admin notices three products were accidentally left in Markup mode when they should have been switched to Fix Price to match a round-number pricing pattern the rest of the storefront follows — a small, easy-to-miss detail when you're the one who's been looking at the same sheet for the last two hours, and exactly the kind of thing a second set of fresh eyes catches in under a minute. The admin rejects with a specific note — "switch SKUs 14, 19 and 22 to Fix Price at ₹499/₹699/₹999 to match the rest of the collection" — and the employee fixes exactly those three rows rather than guessing at what needs attention across the whole batch.

Why a specific rejection reason matters more than a blanket rejection

A rejection with no explanation just tells the employee "something's wrong, figure out what" — which means re-checking the entire batch from scratch, most of which was actually fine. A specific, itemized rejection reason turns the fix into a targeted five-minute correction instead of a full re-review, which is the difference between a review step that speeds up quality over time and one that just adds friction without actually making anyone faster at getting things right the first time.

What this looks like once a team has been doing it for a few months

The specific kinds of mistakes a review step catches tend to repeat — a particular team member consistently forgetting to switch pricing mode, another consistently missing a variant image check. Over time, this pattern becomes visible and addressable directly (a quick reminder, a checklist item specific to that person), which is a benefit the review workflow produces as a side effect, beyond just catching individual mistakes in individual batches.

Why this scales better than it sounds

A review step might sound like it adds a bottleneck as a team grows, but in practice the itemized-rejection habit means most batches pass on the first review once a few recurring mistake patterns have been identified and corrected — the workflow gets faster over time precisely because it surfaces and fixes the same few recurring issues rather than letting them persist unnoticed indefinitely.