Catalogs: Products and Categories
A Commerce Server catalog is an instance of a catalog definition that contains data about individual products and the categories in which they are organized. To create a catalog, you use the Catalog modules in Commerce Server Business Desk to import an external catalog, or build a new catalog, and then publish the catalog to your Web site.
The Catalog
Categories
Products
Product Families and Product Variants
The Catalog
A catalog consists of categories, products, product variants, and properties. Users visiting your Web site navigate through categories, read the descriptions of products, and buy specific products or product variants. The properties provide keywords for users to search for products.
Categories
Categories are individual instances of a category definition. For example, a category definition named Department might be used to create the category Soccer Shirts.
Each category and product can have one primary parent category. The primary parent category provides a canonical path to a child category or product. In addition, if a product is in more than one category, and pricing is set at the category level, only the pricing from the primary parent category is applied to the child categories and products. (You can set pricing at the category level by using either category-level pricing or a virtual catalog price rule on the category.)
Products
Products are single items in your catalog. A product is defined by a combination of property definitions. For example, if you have a product definition named Soccer Shirts, which has the properties Name, Color, and Size, you create a product for each name, color, and size combination that you want to include in your catalog.
Product Families and Product Variants
A product family is a product that contains product variants. A product family is not distinct from a product in any other way.
In the figure in the following The Catalog Definition: A Description of Products and Categories topic, Ace Soccer Shirt is a product family that includes the same type of shirt in all combinations of available colors and sizes. Each combination of type, size, and color is a product variant. A size Large, green shirt with the SKU 115 is one product variant of the Soccer Shirt product; taken together, size, color, and SKU form one variant.
A product family always includes a unique identifier, such as the product name.
A product variant always includes a unique identifier, such as the SKU, and it includes a price. Each product variant is based on the same product definition.
See Also
Base Catalogs and Virtual Catalogs
Catalog Name and Size Restrictions
Unique Identifiers in a Catalog
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