Merchandising Services overview
A product catalog is essential for online shopping experiences, enabling customers to browse, search, and make purchases. For operational efficiency, a product catalog should closely mirror the company’s business structure. Businesses often need to sell products at varying prices based on geographic market, distribution channel, customer segment, and other variables. To accommodate this, an ecommerce platform must offer a flexible catalog data model that allows companies to produce variations of their catalog tailored to these scenarios. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ addresses these needs by offering Merchandising Services powered by Channels and Policies. Merchandising Services provides building blocks that merchants can use to create and manage catalogs at scale. This enables businesses to configure catalogs that align with their business structure and go-to-market strategies.
At a high level, with Merchandising Services you can:
- Use a single base catalog for all your business needs. Scale your catalog quickly across new brands, markets, business-units, go-to-market channels, and customer segments without the need for complete re-architecture. This eliminates data duplication and sets up your ecommerce platform for high operational efficiency.
- Unlock catalog syndication and deliver the right content by designing your product catalog to reflect your business, including products, customers, pricing, and distribution.
- Quickly ingest and update catalog data and rapidly deliver the updates to the storefront for your promotions and campaign needs.
- Accomplish perfect lighthouse scores with ready-to-use, lightning-fast UI components powered by Edge Delivery Services for seamless product browsing and recommendations.
- Adopt a modern composable architecture using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s extensibility architecture (App Builder) to import product data and power headless commerce storefronts using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s API Mesh.
Architecture
Merchandising Services powered by Channels and Policies is a highly scalable, flexible catalog data model which unlocks multi-brand, multi-business unit, multi-language use cases with ease. This model replaces the use of the classic ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce product scopes (website, store, storeview) with new Merchandising Services product scopes (channel, policy, and locale).
The following diagram provides a high-level view of the Merchandising framework.
At the top of this diagram, catalog data (PIM, ERP, and so on) is ingested into the Merchandising Services framework. This catalog data contains SKUs. Each SKU contains scope details (locale) and product attributes, which map to the new Merchandising Services product scopes (channels, policies, and locale).
When all this data is ingested into the Merchandising framework, the result is a new unified base catalog that is available in the Catalog Service data pipeline. In the next part of the diagram, you see multiple channels. Each channel represents a business unit. For example, Texas retail, Texas retail seasonal, and so on. As you can see from the diagram, locales, policies, and price books can all be shared across channels.​
Finally, the diagram shows how this distinct catalog data can be surfaced in various locations, such as an Edge Delivery Services storefront, a marketplace, an advertisement channel, a custom micro-storefront, and so on.
To learn how you can ingest your catalog data into Merchandising using the catalog data ingestion API and how to set up your locales, policies, and price books using the catalog management and rules API, see the .
To learn more about the concepts that make up Merchandising Services, see the following sections.
Product catalog management
Product catalog management encompasses two distinct aspects: product data and product context. Merchandising Services respects the separation of these duties, offering independent management for each.
- Product data - What product is being sold and at what price?
- Product context - Who is selling to whom and where?
Product data
Product data includes the following types:
- Products - Individual SKUs or collections of SKUs that represent physical goods or intangible services with attributes that represent the product including description, weight, size, dimensions, and more. Attributes also specify the channel and policy scopes for a SKU. Products can be grouped into various product types such as simple, configurable, bundle, bundle of bundles, subscriptions, and more.
- Metadata - Product attribute metadata defines and manages how product attributes are displayed on the storefront in product listings, detail pages, search results, and so on. Metadata also defines how product attributes are used in search—sorting, filtering, search weights, and so on.
- Price books and prices - Determines the selling prices of products. In Merchandising Services, a product SKU and price are decoupled, hence you are empowered to define multiple price books for a single SKU. By decoupling the prices from the SKU, you can unlock scope-specific prices across different customers tiers, business units, and geographies. You can define regular and discounted prices and manage all of this at scale.
- Assets - Artifacts associated with products, such as images, videos, PDFs or other file types (future roadmap).
Product context management
Product context management covers the following aspects:
- Channel - Distribution channel defines the path that a business wants to sell products through. A channel is the highest-level abstraction which encapsulates locales and policies.
- Example: Dealers for the automobile industry. Subsidiaries for multi-brand conglomerates. Manufacturing location for suppliers.
- Policy - Data access filter which empowers you to deliver the right content to the right destination. This concept enables catalog syndication capabilities.
- Example: Point of sale physical stores, marketplaces, advertisement pipelines (Google, Facebook, Instagram)
- Scope - Represents the language (locale) for catalogs, for example
en-US. Scope is set at a SKU level during catalog data ingestion.
During product data ingestion and update, a SKU contains the details of scopes and attributes (the attributes map to channels and policies). These define the product context identifiers to which a SKU belongs:
In the above image, each SKU provides:
-
Scope identifiers​
- Locale: Mandatory​
-
Product attributes
- Product attributes are used to map to the relevant channels and policies​
- Example: As an automobile manufacturer, you can choose to create a channel and policy combination for product attributes: (1) Dealers (2) Car brands.​
-
Prices and assigned price books
- Each SKU can have multiple prices defined using multiple pricebooks.
- Example: You offer employees a reduced regular price on auto parts with an additional discount of 25%. You offer VIP customers a higher regular price with a discount of 10%. The product SKU price information ensures that the right price is displayed for each customer segment.
The channel and policy definitions are created using dedicated APIs:
- Scope (locale) - Set at a SKU level during product data ingestion.​
- Channel - Definition created using dedicated APIs. ​
- Policy - Definition created using dedicated APIs.
Key features
- Directly ingest catalog data into the storefront service pipeline which powers: Catalog Service, Product Discovery (Live Search), and Product Recommendations. With this, you can deliver catalog updates at scale for millions of SKUs. This unlocks time sensitive large scale promotion management.
- With the new scopes, Merchandising Services unlocks the ability to scale to multi-geography, multi-business unit, multi-brand and multi-language use cases with ease using a single base catalog.
- Eliminate data redundancy in your catalog management.
- Simple, configurable
- Bundles and bundles of bundles (future roadmap)
- Subscriptions and plans (future roadmap)
- Full support for headless commerce implementations through Catalog Service, Product Discovery (Live Search) and Product Recommendations APIs.
- Out of the box UI component support for product search and product recommendations.
- The UI components are extensible and flexible so that they can be used by both ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s Edge Delivery Service as well as any other storefront implementation.
What type of merchant benefits the most from Merchandising Services?
The following table highlights common challenges merchants encounter and how Merchandising Services powered by Channels and Policies addresses them.
- They sell several brands
- They sell in several countries
- They sell in different languages
- Sells auto or machine parts. The products are the same for all customers.
- Different dealers sell parts to customers
- Each dealer has its own prices, stock and shipping methods
- They have several shipping locations
- They have a different price for each customer
- The same product available in 2 locations for 2 customers have 4 possible prices
Where to go from here
- Ingest data into Merchandising Services using the .
- Manage your catalog and define the channels, policies, and scopes using the
- that shows how a company with a single base catalog can use the Merchandising Services APIs to add product data, define catalogs using projections, and retrieve the catalog data for display in a headless storefront.