Describing the Backoffice Product Cockpit User Interface, and its Structure

You will recall that the Backoffice, the main UI for SAP Commerce Cloud, offers task-specific cockpits and perspectives to meet the needs of the various roles performed by your employees.

The Product Cockpit is tailored to the needs of Product Managers, allowing them to manage products on your site.

Before we dive into the Product Cockpit’s features, let’s take a moment to learn how catalogs are structured in SAP Commerce Cloud.

Products offered for sale on your site are organized into a catalog, the Product Catalog. This is illustrated in the following figure.

This catalog contains one or more catalog version - for example, the Apparel Staged version.

Inside a catalog version, products are organized into categories - for example, Shirts and Trousers. Categories can contain subcategories; in our example, the SAP category is a subcategory of Merchandise. Each product belongs to one or more categories.

As shown in our example, say you want to add an SAP Logo T-shirt to your apparel catalog. Like the existing Henley, it belongs in the Shirts category. however, as it is also corporate merchandise, it might also belong to the SAP category.

Right now, the Logo T-shirt just created exists only in the Staged catalog version, which can only be seen by your company’s employees, so this T-shirt is not yet visible to customers.

The purpose of having two catalog versions is to protect the integrity of the Product Catalog’s data by enabling internal business users to modify this data without disrupting your customers’ shopping experience. Only once you are satisfied that the changes are correct is the data made available to the live site by synchronizing the Staged and Online catalog versions.

Synchronization usually happens in one direction, from Staged to Online.

While you always have the option of syncing the entire catalog version, which is preferable if you modify multiple related items, you can also save time by syncing individual products or categories when merely making simple updates.

In the following figure, the Logo T-shirt we created is copied to the Online catalog version when we synchronize the catalog versions.

The Product Cockpit provides the tools the Product Manager needs to do the following:

• Create and manage product catalogs and product catalog versions
• Manage product categories
• Create, update, and delete products
• Assign products to categories
• Price products
• Create product variants
• Price products together as a bundle
• Search for products
• Import products

The Product Cockpit provides five OOTB (out-of-the-box) views to help you effectively manage your product information.

Each view provides a different perspective on product data:

1. The Bundles view helps you create and manage bundles.
2. The Dashboard displays diagrams showing aggregate product information.
3. The Products view helps you manage products and their data.
4. The Assortment view helps you manage catalog versions and structure product categories inside these catalog versions.
5. The Comparison view helps you make property-level comparisons between the products.