Shop by brand (FAQ)

To help you plan for implementing Shop by Brand functionality on a Optimizely Configured Commerce site, here are some frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Customers who are brand-conscious want to quickly focus their product search within a particular brand they know and trust. Merchandisers need to manage brand identity, including mapping products to brands and featuring or boosting specific brands.

Shop by Brands is a separate top-level taxonomy that is dependent on the data and relationships between products and brands or product lines. The product to category relationships that already exist for the site also determine the categories within brands.

Shop by Brands includes brand-specific navigation and landing pages with category and product line details. Brands and product lines appear in search autocomplete and as filters on product lists. Brand logos or names display throughout the site, for example on product pages and widgets. Updates to the rules engine allow you to create promotions for brands or product lines and page variants for the new brand pages.

You can use import or integration functionality to facilitate how you initially enter brand and product line data and relationships or manually create brands and product lines within the Admin Console. Brand logos, marketing images and descriptions will appear on brand detail pages, if provided.

You also need to set up a recurring job to select product imagery for use on categories and product lines. You must assign products to the brands and product lines you create before enabling this feature using a setting in the Admin Console.

Settings allow you to determine whether to show brands and product lines in autocomplete. You can customize the brand detail page within the CMS, as well as use page variants with the new brand rules to create pages for specific brands.

The images for categories and product lines that appear on brand detail pages show the top-selling product in the brand category or product line. You can override these images by selecting an image in your media library or a product with an image you prefer to display.

You will use the new Brands section within the Catalog area of the Admin Console to manage brands, product lines and category images. You don?t need to reconfigure your category taxonomy or attributes since the site?s logic infers brand categories based on the products assigned to a brand and the categories assigned to those products.

For brand detail pages, you will want to have logos, marketing images and brand descriptions for each brand. The site?s logic will hide widgets for brands that are missing this data. Default images for categories and product lines on these pages will depend on the new Generate Brand Images job.

Currently, you can use Vendors to extend Configured Commerce, for example to identify suppliers who provide products to distributors, route orders or customize inventory messaging and vendor pages, but there is no base functionality tied to Vendors.

With the new Manufacturers list addition for Shop by Brands, you can assign manufacturers to brands. This will allow you to add layers to your brand hierarchy (for example, a product has a manufacturer, which ties it to a brand and product line) and to extend Shop by Brands, if needed. There is also no base functionality tied to Manufacturers.

Attributes do not directly relate to brands, but on product list pages, brands and product lines (when viewing a page in context of a brand) will behave as if they are filterable attributes. While you do not need to make any changes to attributes for Shop by Brands, you must have attribute filters enabled to filter products by brand or product line.

Shop by Brands will honor existing product restrictions such as brand categories will not show if you restrict all underlying products for a customer.