Add products and variants

You can add products and variants to catalogs in Optimizely Commerce Connect. Go to Catalogs and click Add. Choose Product or Variant/SKU.

The basic info properties area provides an overview of catalog entry information. Much of it is created automatically and rarely needs to be changed unless you manually create catalog entries. Click Change to edit a property value.

The Content tab properties depend on the product or variant.

Descriptions can include formatted text, images, and links, using a rich-text editor.

The Belongs To tab displays categories and products, packages, and bundles to which a product or variant belongs. For example, a variant belongs to a product and has a primary category. Also, an item may be part of a Weekly specials category and a Spring package category. See also: Work with categories.

The Edit Prices view lets you view and update pricing for packages and variants. The view displays a compact list of prices, which can be filtered by market or customer group. Market filtering displays both active and inactive markets.

The same item can be available in several markets. For each market, you can define multiple currencies and establish a different price for each one. If you enter no value for any currency, users will not be able to place an order for the item in that currency.

For each product or variant, you can define the following pricing information:

In many cases, pricing information comes from an external system, which may prohibit modifications in Optimizely Commerce Connect.

View prices

Add and edit prices

Modify these fields:

From a product's or variant's context menu:

Set customer group pricing

Use customer groups to set permissions and create targeted marketing campaigns.

A variant is a version of a catalog entry with specific characteristics, such as price, size, and color. You can perform most of the tasks on a variant that you can perform on a catalog entry. See Work with catalog entries.

Use the Assets tab to link a catalog entry to a media file, such as an image or a document. For example, you want to assign a picture to a catalog entry to accompany its website description. You can also link to another CMS page.

To add a media file, open the Assets tab, then drag the file from the Media tab to the Assets tab. Or, click Add Media and select the file.

When assigning media files to a variant, you can assign them to a group, such as Banner. You can then sort the files by clicking the Group column header. To rearrange items, click Move Up or Move Down from the context menu. On the sample site, the item assigned to the default group at the top of the list is used for the main display.

To link to another CMS page, open the Assets tab, select Pages, and drag and drop the page you want to link to in the description.

The Related Entries tab lists catalog entries related to the current one. Typical relationship types are cross-sell and upsell. The types are set up by your developer during implementation.

Here is a typical cross-sell scenario: If a site customer views a page with a specific television model, a section is titled People who bought this also bought, which shows HDMI cables and wall mounts that fit that TV model.

To set up those relations, a merchandiser goes to the television, clicks its Related Entries tabs, and adds suitable cables and wall mounts using the type cross-sell.

Settings is a default tab with several built-in, date-related properties that you rarely need to change.

The Add Product Workflow in Commerce Connect gives you all product information in a single screen with collapsible modules, rather than through tabs. You can quickly browse descriptions, attributes, assets, and so on.

Although the workflow is turned on by default, if you are on the latest Commerce Connect package, you can opt out by clicking Opt-out Product Workflow. 

If you want to go back to the workflow, you can click Opti-in Product Workflow. Your content carries over between the two modes.

To view the contents of each section, click anywhere on the module bar to expand it.

To collapse a module, click anywhere near the top or on the arrow.

The other options, like publishing and editing content, work the same.