Work with catalogs

The Optimizely Commerce Connect Catalog subsystem, architecture, and APIs provide great flexibility for designing and implementing catalogs. No single approach works for every catalog design. Organizations in the same business may create very different catalogs depending on what they are trying to accomplish and their choices. However, there are some central things to consider when designing catalogs.

As with all systems, defining a complete set of requirements for what you are trying to accomplish with your catalog is essential. When creating a catalog structure, consider the following important questions.

Many ecommerce applications for Optimizely Commerce Connect and Optimizely Configured Commerce require integration across various systems. Not all ecommerce implementations require integration. However, data is increasingly being shared with internally managed systems and external providers. The following are examples of typical system integrations.

Think carefully about the data you need. Migrating your product catalog to a new system may give you support for ecommerce and reporting features that you currently do not have. These features normally require data that is needed but non-existent in your current system. Plan the data you need to support your site, reporting, marketing, and merchandising and to ensure all requirements are met.

Catalog entries are the catalog's products, variants, bundles, and packages. Custom types can be derived from all of these to map to different product types to store their respective characteristics. For example, a shoe could have fields for lining and sole materials, while a scarf would have only one field for material, and something completely different, like a wine, would have vintage and country of origin fields.

For each product type, there is often an SKU type, adding the characteristics that vary between product variants, such as a shoe variant with a size field and a scarf variant with a color field.

Catalog categories provide structure to your catalog content. While search is a vital part of an ecommerce site, many customers still want to go to a site as they would a physical store or print catalog. Display templates can use catalog categories to provide this experience.

You can export the catalog as an XML file, and then write an XSLT template to transform the XML file to a printable version or format for other purposes. See MSDNfor information about XSLT.

As noted in the previous section, the best way to structure a catalog depends on the site. The same is true for variants that belong to the same product. The following are some general guidelines for all sites.