Five out-of-the-box OOTB views are available to help you effectively manage your product information.
Each view provides a different perspective on product information:
- The Bundles view helps you create and manage bundles.
- The Dashboard provides an overview of essential product information in diagrams.
- The Products view helps you manage the products.
- The Assortment view helps you manage the catalog versions and structure product categories inside the catalogs.
- The Comparison view helps you make property-level comparisons between the products.
Bundles View
The Bundles view provides options to display product bundles in a List, Tree, or Grid view. Product bundles provide discounts when specific products are purchased together. This feature is discussed in a later unit of the course.
Dashboard
The Product Cockpit Dashboard, which is displayed by default when you first log in, provides a visual representation of the product data. Its Edit button allows you to move the existing widgets around on the page.
Products View
The products view provides a product-centric UI that facilitates product management tasks. This view allows you to set and modify any product attribute. You can determine which products need your attention by performing a search for products with specific property values, for instance, by filtering the list to show only products whose approval status is check.
After selecting multiple products, you may edit them together, switching between them in the editor window.
Alternatively, this view can help you determine which products need your attention. You can use the search field to locate the products you want to work on, and quickly switch between these products as you edit them. You may also flip between all the products attached to a workflow.
When editing a product, the Backoffice Product Cockpit displays a product’s properties on a tabbed page. Every tab starts with an Essential section, which displays the same properties on every tab, followed by that tab’s sections. In the example below, the Properties tab displays three sections: Essentials, Validity Period, and Descriptions.
You can find the product’s prices on the Prices tab, its images on the Multimedia tab, product reviews on the Reviews tab, and so on. Most OOTB properties are allocated to their respective tabs in Backoffice configuration files. All properties that are not assigned in these configuration files can be found in the last tab, Administration.
The following image shows the tabbed product editing page. On the right, the four products being edited together are displayed, allowing you to switch between them with a single selection.
Assortment View
The Assortment view helps the product manager categorize products. While you can place a product under any number of categories by editing its parent category property in the Product view, the Assortment view allows you to do so using drag-and-drop. Dropping a product onto a category moves it there; holding the option/alt key causes the product to appear in both original and target categories.
To facilitate drag-and-drop operations, you can split the Assortment view into up to four window panes to display both the source and target of a drag-and-drop operation. You can split the page vertically or horizontally and resize the panes to make the best use of your screen’s real estate.
For example, you might show an explorer tree in the left pane, the products in the selected category in the middle pane, and a second explorer tree on the right displaying the category to which you wish to drag one or more of the products.
Comparison View
You can use the Comparison View to compare attribute and property values of multiple items of any type. The widget performs a comparison between a reference item and other selected items. The result is formatted as a grid.
The compared properties may include the product overview, properties, prices, variants, and extended attributes. The product you select first will serve as the reference item for the comparison.
Several functionalities in the Compare View allow you to:
- See a report of attribute values and the differences between them for all provided items
- Change which of the selected products serves as the reference item
- Add more items to the comparison grid at any time
- Dismiss an item from the comparison grid
- Collapse and expand sections to manage your screen real estate
Product Editing Toolbar
The Product Editing toolbar in the Backoffice Product Cockpit simplifies and streamlines the process of managing product information. It's displayed in the Assortment, Bundles, and Products views. The Products view has the most complete toolbar, which allows you to create or search for products. Once located, a product can be edited, deleted, cloned, or even synchronized.
The toolbar also allows you to create, import, or export products, as well as bulk edit and compare products.
Each icon in the Products view toolbar affects the selected products as described in the following annotated screenshot:
Using the Product Editing Toolbar
Let's observe now how Milly uses the Product Editing Toolbar for some of her common tasks.