Defining the Product Data Enrichment Process

Let's review the steps involved in the product data enrichment process, as shown in the following diagram:

For individual items, the product manager can execute these steps manually in Backoffice. For multiple items, consider using the bulk Backoffice Excel-format import feature, web services, or ImpEx, the SAP Commerce import/export tool.

Importing or Creating Products

Backoffice supports manually creating individual products and importing multiple products in bulk.

Defining Dynamic Attributes

• New dynamic attributes can be defined by business users by creating classification categories and feature descriptors.
• Add dynamic attributes to existing products by assigning them to classification categories, then setting values for some or all of these attributes.

Adding Variants

• Variants facilitate selling products in different colors, sizes, and so on.
• Simple variants have excellent performance but require developer assistance to set up.
• Multidimensional variants have good performance and can be configured by business users in Backoffice.
• When creating multidimensional variant products, also create the supporting category structure.

Setting Price and Inventory

• Basic pricing in different currencies.
• Custom prices for specific users, user groups, or product groups.
• Special pricing for bulk purchases.
• Seasonal or channel pricing.
• Assign stock availability for different warehouses.

Adding Media and Images

• Media can be images, video, sound, and so on.
• Media is used for a product’s main and alternate image, and for product thumbnails used in Backoffice.
• Media can be grouped in containers to support responsive page design.

Defining SEO and Marketing Information

• This optional task involves setting metadata used by search engines, such as Google or Bing.
• Helping search engines correctly and efficiently find products on the site is called search engine optimization (SEO).

Setting Product Relationships

• This second optional task involves setting links to other products for cross-sell or upsell purposes.
• These links will appear on the page displaying a product’s detailed information.

Applying Localization and Translation

This third optional task concerns setting localized values for every product’s localized properties, in the languages (locales) supported by the website.

Validating and Approving

• Use the Backoffice Workflow feature to ensure each product is properly validated before approval.
• Only approved products appear on the production website, visible to customers.
• Unlike the previous steps, validation and approval are normally done manually in Backoffice.

Publishing and Synchronization

• Products are published to the production website by synchronizing the product catalog.
• A synchronization action can affect a single product, all products in a category, or the entire Staging catalog version.
• Synchronization is also normally performed manually in Backoffice, and does not interrupt the site’s activity. However, the synchronization of large numbers of products should be scheduled to run when the site is less busy.