Business Desk Catalogs

You use the Catalogs modules to create catalogs of products, and to add and update product data. As a business manager, you do not need any specialized knowledge about the databases that store your product data, even if you are assembling a catalog of products from different sources, such as several different suppliers.

This section contains:

• Workflow for Creating a Base Catalog. Illustrates the workflow for creating a base catalog.
• Workflow for Creating a Virtual Catalog. Illustrates the workflow for creating a virtual catalog.
• About Catalogs. Describes the components of a catalog, and provides an overview of the steps to create a catalog definition.
• Catalog Name and Size Restrictions. Lists characters that are not permitted when you assign names to catalogs, properties, products, and categories.
• Best Practices for Catalogs. Provides important information about creating and managing your catalogs.
• Importing and Exporting Catalogs. Explains how to validate and import an Extensible Markup Language (XML) catalog file, how to import a comma-separated values (CSV) catalog file, and how to export a catalog to a share.
• Creating a Catalog Definition. Explains how to define category, product, and property definitions for a catalog.
• Creating a Base Catalog. Explains how to create a base catalog. Base catalogs can be multilingual.
• Adding a Category to a Catalog. Explains how to add a category to a catalog.
• Adding a Product to a Catalog. Explains how to add a product to a catalog.
• Adding Product Variants to a Product. Explains how to add product variants to a product.
• Adding a Language to a Catalog. Explains how to add more than one language to a catalog so you can create a multilingual catalog.
• Creating a Virtual Catalog. Explains how to create a virtual catalog for the purposes of aggregating multiple catalogs that appear to users as a single catalog, converting products to an alternate currency, and providing special pricing, or subsets of products, for specified groups of users.
• Creating a Multilingual Catalog. Explains how to create a catalog that displays product information in multiple languages.
• Translating a Catalog with Business Desk. Explains how to use the Catalog Editor module to translate a few products in a multilingual catalog into other languages.
• Translating a Catalog by Exporting/Importing. Explains how to translate many multilingual products into other languages by exporting the catalog to XML, sending the XML-based catalog to a translator, and then importing the translated catalog into the catalog database used by Microsoft Commerce Server 2002.
• Creating a Catalog Set. Explains how to create a catalog set by combining multiple catalogs and then assigning user access to the catalog set.
• Pricing a Product in a Base Catalog. Explains how to set product prices in your catalog at both the product level and the product variant level, how to price groups of products, how to set prices in a virtual catalog, and how to price products in multiple currencies.
• Creating Category Hierarchies. Explains how to establish hierarchies for categories within a catalog so you can organize the categories and products on your site.
• Creating Category and Product Relationships. Explains how to create relationships within a catalog so you can organize the products in your catalog and make it easier for users to navigate to the products they want.
• Refreshing and Publishing a Catalog. Explains how to publish catalog updates to your Web site, and how to refresh the full-text indexes so that the new catalog data is available to the search feature.
• Sending a Catalog to a Trading Partner. Explains how to send a catalog to a trading partner.
• Finding Items in a Catalog. Explains how to find products in a catalog by using a keyword search or to search by properties.
• Managing Catalog Definitions. Explains how to edit and delete property definitions, product definitions, and category definitions.
• Managing Products, Categories, Catalogs, and Catalog Sets. Explains how to edit and delete products, categories, catalogs, and catalog sets.
• Managing Category and Product Relationships. Explains how to edit and delete category and product relationships.

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