Manage content

6 min

An ecommerce website displays content from the product catalog, through types of categorization, faceted navigation, or filtering. In Optimizely Commerce Connect, content is information entered onto Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) pages and blocks, and information related to ecommerce catalog entries such as categories, products and variants. Catalog content often is based on data retrieved from external systems.

Different user groups update content. For example, merchandisers organize the product catalog, manage pricing and enrich the product information, whereas marketers and editors create campaign pages and promote products.

Catalog content

Catalog content consists of various types of catalog entries, such as categories, products, variants, package and bundles.

The Catalog view lets you:

Create new categories and add products and variants to these in the product catalog structure. See Work with categories.

Browse the catalog tree to see the structure of catalog entries, and the content types on which they are based.

Create relationships between catalog entries using drag-and-drop functionality.

Edit catalog entries such as categories, products and variants from the On-Page Editing or the All Properties editing views.

Add text, media such as images and videos, and links to properties in different content types such as adding a product description. See Manage content in the CMS.

Manage pricing across products, markets and customer groups, compare prices filtered by markets and customer groups, and make adjustments as needed. See Manage pricing.

Create a link to an entity in the product catalog using the Link tool. From the Create Link dialog box in the editor or a link property in the content, you can create a link to a catalog, a category, catalog entry, or a variant.

Publish changes directly on the website, or schedule it for later publishing.

Create a link to a marketing campaign or promotion using the Marketing content field.

Catalogs gadget

You can access the Catalogs gadget in the CMS and Commerce Connect asset pane. Use the gadget to drag catalog entries into the rich-text editor or a content area of a CMS page or block, to display and promote product information, such as a campaign page.

You can also use the Catalogs gadget to create relation links between catalog entries by dragging catalog items into the Relations tab of other catalog entries. See Related entries.

Note

To properly display product information when used in other types of content, you must adapt the rendering templates to display catalog content.

Multiple language content

If you have business in multiple markets, you may need your website and content catalog to be in multiple languages, which you can activate in Commerce Connect. See Multi-language management.

Publish or unpublish content

Optimizely CMS gives you several publishing actions (including unpublishing) and ways to manage versions and create shared content. See Publish versions of content for information.

Personalized content

The personalize with audiences feature in Optimizely CMS targets content to specific visitor groups. For example, you can design campaigns based on recent orders or the total spent amount for a customer. The personalization option is available in the rich-text editor, and is also applied to available block on your website. See Commerce Connect personalization criteria.

If you have Optimizely Search & Navigation installed on your website, you can promote content in your product catalog by adding best bets to the search results. See Optimizely Search & Navigation.