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, and then synchronizes it to the Online version used by the live site.
- Product deletion follows a similar pattern: 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. However, the product will then reappear the next time the catalog is synchronized!
- While we focus in this lesson on creating products manually using the Backoffice Product Cockpit, keep in mind that product creation on your site will mostly be done in bulk, using the Backoffice Excel import feature. This will be covered in a later lesson.
When manually creating a product, Backoffice displays a multipart 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.
Adding a Product
Managing Product Content
The Backoffice Product Cockpit’s powerful interface helps you maintain an accurate, up-to-date, and organized product catalog.
These content modifications are important for many reasons, for instance:
- Product introduction and updates
- Seasonal or promotional changes
- Discontinued products
- Fixing mistakes in product info Multichannel consistency
- Product Lifecycle Management
Modifying Product Content
The product manager will have many reasons to modify product data, including:
- Keeping the product’s metadata up to date, including its product code, description, summary, SKU, manufacturer, and so on.
- Setting the product’s validity period (for example, seasonal products)
- Adding product variants
- Add prices in one or more currencies
- Manage stock levels
- Add media (that is, images) to products, for instance an image gallery, thumbnails, or logos
- Add references to other products for cross-selling or upselling purposes
- Assign classification metadata to products
Approving Products (Set Product Approval Status)
Another important responsibility of the product manager is to control products’ visibility by setting their approval status. Setting product 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 publish validated and approved products to your e-commerce platform.
Product status can either be unapproved, check, or approved. Like other product properties, the status will be copied to the live (online) product catalog during synchronization. There, only approved products will be displayed to customers and offered for sale. Products with check or unapproved status are invisible to the customer and cannot be added to the cart.
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.
Okay, but what are workflows? And how do they function in the Backoffice Product Cockpit?
Collaborating Using Workflows
Workflows can help formalize a data manipulation process performed in Backoffice, often involving the participation of multiple employees. The workflow identifies a series of steps that must be carried out, often by specific individuals or roles, and codifies the decision process that results in consistent, correct information being displayed on the live website.
For example, a workflow handling customer complaints might allow the complaint to be directed to the correct agent and its resolution validated by a manager.
For a more detailed example, the process of creating a new product might involve the input of employees tasked with product management, product pricing, product marketing, and stock maintenance, followed by validation of the data from someone in a position of authority. A workflow can ensure that all input steps are complete before validation can be performed; that validation can in turn be configured to allow the approver to request that an input step be corrected. Only once all the workflow’s actors have signed off on the product will it be published to the live site.
Here's a graphical representation of this workflow, based on what you would see when selecting the Show Flow button in the Backoffice collaboration pane, or when editing a workflow using the Template Designer:
The preceding diagram shows a workflow the Diva website might use to manage product editing. It involves the following steps:
- The workflow is created by Milly, acting as Product Manager. She attaches one or more products before starting the workflow.
- The workflow begins with two tasks in parallel:
- The task of providing product details is assigned to Robert, the detail manager
- The task of entering prices is assigned to Harriet, the price manager
- When both of these users have completed their tasks, the workflow assigns the product approval task to the Product Administrator.
- Milly, this time acting as Product Administrator, selects one of three possible outcomes:
- She rejects the product detail editing, reviving Robert’s product detail editing task.
- She rejects the prices created, reviving Harriet’s product pricing task.
- She approves the product, which ends the workflow.
The following diagram shows the workflow details info seen by Milly, the workflow’s creator, and by Robert, the user assigned to one of its tasks.
Workflow Key Features
Consider the following important workflow features:
- Every workflow is based on a workflow template, which controls its behavior.
- An active workflow’s state includes the items attached to it, and which step it's currently on.
- You cannot edit a running workflow’s behavior; to alter a workflow’s structure, edit its template before creating a new instance.
- Create workflow instances manually, automatically using a script, or on a schedule (using a CronJob).
- Every task can be assigned to individual users or any user in a particular group.
- Task or workflow completion can be configured to trigger an email notification.
- Administrator can see all active workflows in the Collaboration Center overview.
- View workflow structure in Backoffice using Show Flow button.
- Edit workflow templates in Backoffice using graphical Workflow Designer.