Use the Product Cockpit to create and delete products from the catalog.
Remember that websites commonly divide the Product Catalog into Staging and Online versions.
The Staging version is visible only to website employees; only the Online version is visible to customers.
The product management team first creates a product in the Staging version, completes, and approves its configuration then synchronizes it to the Online version used by the live site.
We focus on creating products manually using the Backoffice Product Cockpit in this lesson. Keep in mind that product creation on your site will mostly be done by sourcing product information from a source system, such as an SAP ERP. Other import methods include using the Excel Import feature or hot folders.
When manually creating a product, Backoffice displays a multi-part dialog inviting you to enter a few basic properties, most of them essential properties. Once the product is created, you may edit it to enter additional properties.
Product deletion follows a similar pattern to product creation: products are deleted in Staging and disappear from the site after a synchronization.
It's possible to delete a product directly from the online catalog version, removing it immediately from the website, assuming product managers have access to the online version. However, the product will then reappear the next time the catalog is synchronized, as the product information from the staged catalog is copied during synchronization.
Adding a Product
Approving Products (Setting Product Approval Status)
After having created a new product, the product manager needs to control the products’ visibility by setting their approval status. Setting a product’s approval status in SAP Commerce Cloud helps maintain product quality, compliance, brand consistency, and accuracy. It establishes a controlled and governed environment to manage product information. It also ensures that only validated and approved products are published to your storefront.
Product status can either be unapproved, check, or approved. As with other product properties, the status will be copied to the Online product catalog during synchronization. There, only approved products will be shown to customers and offered for sale. Products in check or unapproved status are invisible to the customer and can't be added to the cart.
Note
If you come across a faulty product on your storefront, change its approval status to "unapproved" to make it invisible to customers immediately. Afterwards, correct the staged version of the product, which remains approved. This updated version will replace the erroneous one during the next synchronization.
You can approve products manually, either by changing the approval state in the product editor or using the Bulk Edit or Bulk Approval actions to perform bulk approval of your products. See the following diagram.
In practice, though, setting the approval status is usually one of the final actions of a workflow, and often edited in bulk for multiple products at once. We'll be taking a closer look at bulk editing later in this course.