Organizing Product /Category Relationship in the BackOffice Product Cockpit​

The Product Catalog, like all catalogs used by SAP Commerce Cloud, is organized into Catalog Versions. The use of versions prevents users from viewing catalog edits until Backoffice users are ready to publish them. When they are, parts or all of the Staging version are synchronized with the Online version, which is visible to customers.

You can arrange the products in your catalog version into product categories. A category may contain products, other categories, or both. What’s more, a product may also belong to more than one category.

Products in a catalog version are organized using a category hierarchy.

• Each category may contain products, subcategories, or both.
• Products and categories may have any number of parent categories.
• Products are the basic element of the catalog. They correspond to SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units). If using product variants, it's the product’s purchasable variants that correspond to SKUs.

The category hierarchy supports the following features:

• Product navigation: The storefront’s navigation bar can be configured to mirror portions of the catalog hierarchy, which helps the customer browse the catalog.
• Dynamic product attributes: Products inherit dynamic attributes based on their position in the category hierarchy.
• Using multidimensional product variants, the site can determine the correct variant product by matching its parent categories to the customer’s selections on the product details page.
• Marketing and promotions: The product manager can limit the scope of promotion rules to products in specific categories.
• Customizing and personalizing search results: Rules controlling search result ordering can be customized. Facet filtering can be defined for specific categories and inherited by subcategories if necessary.
• Reporting and analysis. Sales data can be analyzed on a per-category basis.

Consider the following example from the Apparel storefront:

Now on the storefront, when you search for Specter Gloves, you can find them in the Gloves category or in the Burton category under Brands.

Similarly, when you search for Bender Jacket, you can look under the Snow Jackets and Special Blend categories, along with the Snow collection category.