Managing Catalogs
A product catalog is an organized list of products. The catalogs can be found in the Global scope (main catalog), sales and dependent scopes. Virtual scopes do not have a catalog. Global and sales scopes have their own catalogs, whereas dependent scopes get their catalog of their inheriting parent sales scope.
For example, a dependent scope gets the same product information, taxonomy and structure as the catalog of its parent sales scope.
You can tailor your product offerings by sales region, country, outlet, season, or market. A new catalog of the same name is created automatically when an Administrator creates a new scope. The global scope contains the global catalog, which includes all products from all scopes. All scopes other than virtual scopes have a catalog which defines the product offering for the associated scope. However, the catalog of a dependent scope cannot with the exception of product pricing and merchandising relationships
You can manage catalogs by creating categories and adding products to the catalog. Creating categories in a sales scope does not influence the taxonomy of the global scope catalog. You can import or export the contents of the catalog. You can also manage relationships and associations or delete categories and products.
When products are created in the global catalog, they are available for sales catalogs and can inherit from the global catalog when changes are published. You can also create products in a sales catalog. However, the product will not be available for other catalogs. Products created in a sales catalog are also stored in the global catalog, in the Scoped_Items category. The products in the Scoped_Items category can be made available if they are categorized properly in the global catalog.
In the example above, in the Commerce Modeler you have a global scope and 2 sales scopes. The global scope catalog has 10000 products. The Better Retail Canada scope has 8000 products inheriting from the global scope and 1000 products that were created at the sales scope level. However, the Better Retail USA scope contains 5000 products inheriting from the global scope and 2500 custom products created directly in the sales scope. The 2500 custom products would also be visible under the Scoped_Items category in the global scope catalog. Nonetheless, the Better Retail scope may offer different products at different prices in other markets.
For more information about modifying products, see Modifying a Product.
REFERENCES
| • | Managing Products |
| • | Pushing products to sales scopes |
| • | Importing data |
| • | Exporting product data |
| • | Product Publication Workflow |
| • | Setting Maximum Numbers for Product Entities |
| • | Setting Catalog Languages |