Milly is responsible for maintaining an accurate, up-to-date, and organized product catalog, and will do so using the Backoffice Product Cockpit’s user-friendly interface to add, change, or delete products.
She will be called to make such content modifications for many reasons, including the following:
- Introduction of new products
- Product updates
- Seasonal or Promotional Changes
- Discontinued Products
- Fixing mistakes in product data
- Managing the product lifecycle
Manually Adding a Product
If Milly wanted, for example, to add the SAP Logo T-shirt we mentioned earlier to the apparel catalog. Assuming she is creating it from scratch, she would:
- Create a new product and assign it to a category, for instance, Shirts
- Add prices and stock information
- Add media, including a large image for the product details page and a thumbnail for the category listing
- Add cross-sell references to other SAP-branded merchandise
- Ask someone on her team to review her changes, probably using a workflow. When it is reviewed, the product’s approval status can be confirmed, and the product synchronized with the customer-facing catalog version
Enriching Product Data
While it’s true that Milly can use the Product Cockpit to manually create new products, as she did in the previous example, it’s more common for her to import multiple products from an external source, either through an automated process, or when she uses the Product Cockpit to import product data from Excel-formatted files.
When she imports products that way, it’s likely Milly will want to enrich the imported product information with additional data not provided by the import source.
The process of enriching product data may involve any of the following steps:
- Adding variants, which allow, for instance, a particular color or size to be selected
- Price products in one or more currencies and setting stock levels
- Adding media and images
- Ensuring the product is easily located using a search engine (SEO)
- Adding marketing information
- Setting product relationships to facilitate, for instance, cross-sell or up-sell
- Providing localization and translation
- Validating and approving products for display on the customer-facing website