Overview
The Product Catalog consists of parents and variants that are created from Source Inventory. These represent variants that are your own (rather than source-specific), as you have potentially merged inventory variants from multiple sources and customized product content, quantity and pricing data.
| Flxpoint Terminology Tip: Products |
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The term "products" when referring to your Product Catalog typically refers to both product parents and variants. |
Merging (or aggregating) source inventory data allows you to take advantage of:
- Aggregated rich product data
- Aggregated pricing
- Aggregated quantity
- Product data/pricing/quantity customization
Example:
- Distributor A and Distributor B both have the same product in stock.
- Distributor A's product is cheaper, but has very little product content.
- Distributor B's product is more expensive, but has much more detailed product content.
In this example, a product may be built with aggregated pricing and quantity and combined product content from these two source products.
This allows you to potentially list leveraging Distributor A's price, while taking advantage of additional data from Distributor B.
Deriving Product Data
These product variants are not physical representations of a product and could be derived from one or many different sources. Data is broken down into two sections: rich content and pricing and quantity.
Rich content (static) only changes on a variant by using the Product Builder or by manually editing data. This serves as a mini product information management system (PIM).
For more information on the Product Builder, see Build Products.
Some examples rich content fields include:
- Categories
- Brand
- MPN
Pricing and quantity (dynamic) changes as associated source inventory values change, since product variants are associated to source inventory. Some examples of pricing and quantity fields include:
- Cost
- Quantity
Example:
From the previous example, Distributor A's product is $3 and Distributor B's product is $5. Each distributor has 10 inventory in stock for this product, and these values are visible on the Source Products.
If the aggregate SUM was chosen for Quantity, the quantity of the product variant would be 20.
If the aggregate Average was chosen for Cost, the product variant cost would be $4
The pricing and quantity fields will fluctuate in your product catalog if the source inventory fields change.
Your product variant rich content will remain the same even when these fields change on the source inventory variants. This content is only changed when the Product Builder runs.
How to Create Product Variants
Product variants are traditionally created through the Build Products process.
You may also choose to manually create a product in the Product Catalog and associate it with a source.
Searching Products
To learn more about searching for product variants, see Searching Products.
Delete Products
To learn more about Deleting the product variants, Click here Deleting Products