The following character restrictions apply for the indicated properties:
Item
Name and size restrictions
Property Definition Name
A property definition name can be up to 100 characters long.
A numeral is not allowed in the first position.
Do not use commas (,) or periods (.).
Do not use characters that are not accepted in an XML tag name. For a list of resources on XML, see the MSDN Online XML Development Center available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=5161.
Do not use "ProductID" or "VariantID" in property definition names.
Product Definition Name
A product definition name can be up to 128 characters long.
Category Definition Name
A category definition name can be up to 128 characters long.
Catalog Name (internal name, not the one displayed on your Web site)
The name must be unique.
A catalog name can be up to 85 characters long.
Do not use brackets ([,]), apostrophes ('), parentheses ((,)), or number signs (#). Do not use commas or periods.
There are no restrictions on the catalog display name.
If you have two or more Commerce Server sites with separate databases in which catalog data is stored, and the sites are sharing the same Data Warehouse, do not give the same name to the different catalogs for the two different sites. If two catalogs have the same name, the Data Warehouse treats them as one catalog.
Category Name
The name must be unique.
Do not use slashes (/) or quotation marks ("). Do not use commas.
Do not use a name that is more than 100 characters long.
Product Name
The maximum length of the product name depends on the value specified in the product definition. Commerce Server does not limit the length.
For each product, use a unique name.
Verify that none of your category and product name combinations are repeated.
If you create a catalog for a site, and you have non-unique product names within categories, the wrong product might be added to the shopping basket when the user selects a product for purchase. This occurs because the product name is appended to the category name. For example, product 1A in category B and product A in category B1 are both stored as "B1A."