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Understanding Supported Product Variants

<div id="content"><p tabindex="0">Product variants allow the customer to select the exact variation of a product they wish to acquire by specifying values for its variant attributes, such as color or size.</p><p tabindex="0">SAP Commerce Cloud supports two types of Product Variants. Let's explore each one individually.</p><ul style="list-style-type:disc"><li tabindex="0"><strong>Basic Product Variants</strong>: <div class="kalturaVideoLessonWrapper"><div aria-label="This video explains the concept of Basic Product Variants, using a T-shirt as an example." class="kalturaVideoLessonContainer" data-testid="video" id="1_jbkev28j"></div></div>Note, while the <strong>Basic Product Variants</strong> offers a higher-performance advantage, even with the inclusion of more custom attributes, it's essential to understand that it can be costly due to the required technical development in such situations.</li><li tabindex="0"><strong>Multidimensional Product Variants</strong>: &nbsp;<div class="kalturaVideoLessonWrapper"><div aria-label="This video explains the concept of Multidimensional Product variants and provides an example using a shoe at the end." class="kalturaVideoLessonContainer" data-testid="video" id="1_ad8shurk"></div></div>Keep in mind, this approach allows business users to add new variant attributes in the Backoffice. It offers good performance but is slower than the basic approach.</li></ul></div>

Supported Product Variants

Exploring the Technical Essentials of SAP Commerce Cloud

In this video, I’ll tell you how basic product variants are supported out-of-the-box in SAP Commerce Cloud. In general, product variants are products of identical design and functionality, but with different size, color, etc. For example, a base product “T-Shirt” has two color variants: black and white. But first of all, in SAP Commerce, you need to distinguish between a base product and a variant product. Let’s open the product cockpit in the backoffice, and do a search for “M25687”. You can see that several results are returned. Specifically, a base product called “T-Shirt Men Playboard Skull SS” is identified by the single gray cuboid; while the variants of the base product are identified by a multi-cuboid icon in the status column. So, what exactly does this mean? In SAP Commerce, product variants simplify the process of managing your products by allowing you to create variant products related to a base product. Variants are intended to cover a small number of variations from a base product, e.g. different colors, sizes, or fits. To create product variants, you need to first create a base product and set a variant type on that base product. Then you will be able to create variant products based on the base product. Base products that have variants only exist to facilitate the creation of those variants, because you wouldn’t want to sell jeans without a size. This means, if you are using variant products the base product cannot be purchased. The VariantProduct type is used to select style, size, color, etc., but in a hierarchical way. And actual purchasable Stock Keeping Units, or SKUs, correspond to the selected Variant Product on the lowest level. For example, you can see that the base product here is the Men’s short sleeve shirt. It is viewable, but not purchasable, on the storefront. I can select the intermediate style variant: black. But it is still not purchasable. Only when I finally select the size, e.g. small, can I then purchase this item, namely a small black shirt. From a technical perspective, the implementation of basic variant products has the following structure. A regular product has its variants if the variants property is not null. And all those variants are of the type VariantProduct, in this example, StyleVariantProduct. The two styles, Red and Blue are on the next level. And each of those has a collection of next-level variants, this time of the type SizeVariantProduct. And finally, the blue style variant has three next-level variants that correspond to 3 sizes: small, medium and large. Since this is a two-tier variant model, the second variant type has a null value for its variantType property, and an empty collection for its variants property.

Multi-Dimensional Products Variants

Hello! In this video, I’m going to talk about how multi-dimensional product variants are supported out-of-the-box in SAP Commerce Cloud. We have already learnt about basic product variants. But SAP Commerce offers an additional approach to modeling product variants for more complicated cases. This basis of this modelling approach are known as multi-dimensional product variants. To support this approach, we introduce a new type called GenericVariantProduct, which extends VariantProduct. Following this approach, each GenericVariantProduct is associated with a base product and becomes the purchasable stock keeping unit. The properties used to differentiate one SKU from another will be determined by VariantCategories... ...and VariantValueCategories, both of them extend the Category type.  We can think of VariantCategories as attributes by color and size. And the VariantValueCategories as their corresponding attributes, like red or large. Let’s consider a base product called Oxford Shirt, belonging to the normal category Shirts. Out-Of-The-Box, we can use the three VariantCategory items that will serve as selector properties for the customer to narrow the selection to the GenericVariantProducts for that Product. For example, 3 VariantCategory items: Color, Size and Material are assigned directly as supercategories of the Oxford Shirt product. Note that color serves as the first level variant selector, size as the second, and material as the third. In order to define the available choices for each Variant Category, Variant Value Categories are assigned as children of variant categories, in the order given by their sequence number property. In this example, Color has Red, Blue and Green and each variant value category has a sequence number, indicating the order in which it will be displayed. Similarly, size has two choices, Small and Large. And Material can be either Silk or Cotton. Finally, we can create GenericVariantProduct. In our example, it’s an Oxford Shirt because it is associated with our Oxford Shirt product through its baseProduct property. Now we can put the VariantValueCategory items together with the generic variant product. We assign Blue, Large, and Cotton as the GenericVariantProduct’s supercategories. With this assignment, the generic variant product becomes a Blue Large Cotton Oxford Shirt. Let’s also take a look at our sample B2B Accelerator shop. This pair of shoes has color:Black, fit:M, size:5 But how do the property values get assigned? Let’s take a look at the product in backoffice. To illustrate the multi-dimensional product approach, I’ll switch to the Category System tab. As you can see, the product is assigned to 3 VariantValueCategories, which correspond to the product’s size, fit and color displayed on the storefront. That’s it for this video.

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