Products

Products are the items or services that you might want to sell in your store. In Product Experience Manager, a product has a name, description, ID, and SKU. Products can also have additional attributes and associated rich media assets, such as product images or a file containing additional product details. If your store supports multiple languages, you can localize product names and descriptions.

Product data is stored in a database. After you add products, you can update product information, add images and other assets, and associate products with one or more hierarchy nodes. You can export the updated product information back to other business systems so that your organization sees a consistent view of products.

While defining products, the products are in a draft state. Your organization can develop the criteria and business processes to help determine when a product is ready to go live and appear in a catalog.

To appear in a catalog, a product must meet the following criteria:

• The product is live.
• The product is associated with at least one hierarchy.
• The catalog references a hierarchy that includes the product.

Product Types

Commerce automatically assigns types to the products you create. In Commerce Manager, you can see at a glance the product types in a list of a products. In addition, you can filter on product types in both the API and Commerce Manager.

Product types can also be used in catalogs. For example, in your catalog, you can filter on parent so that only your parent products are displayed in your storefront.

Products have one of the following types:

• standard - Standard products are a standalone products.
• parent - A parent product is a product that has child products that have been built using the Build Child Products endpoint.
• child - When you configure product variations and variation options for parent products, the child products derived from the parent products are automatically created in Commerce.
• bundle - A bundle is a purchasable product, comprising one or more standalone products (in other words, components) to be sold together. See Bundle Components and Options.

note

In Commerce Manager, standard products are called Product.

Product Tags

You can use product tags to store or assign a key word against a product or service that you sell in your store. The product tag can then be used to describe or label that product. Product tags represent similarities between products who do not share the same attributes. Using product tags means that you can group your products together, for example, by brand, category, subcategory, colors, types, industries, and so on.

See Product Tags.

Personalizing Products

You can allow your shoppers to add custom text to a product when adding product items to their carts. This is useful, for example, if you have a product like a T-shirt that can be personalized or you sell greetings cards that can be printed with your shoppers personalized messages. You can do this by configuring the the custom_inputs attribute. See Create a product.