Process: Load electronic catalog data
Flow
Objective
Create and update a master catalog by batch loading categories, products, and SKUs.
Description
Businesses may receive product information from suppliers and manufacturers in a structured format such as XML, spreadsheets or text delimited files. Others may manage some or all their product data in house but store it outside of WebSphere Commerce. These businesses will need to transform and load structured data directly to the database using either the editor and Loader utility, or the catalog import interface provided by WebSphere Commerce.
Further, businesses with many different sources of product data must normalize, rationalize and cleanse product information in order to consistently describe products of varying origins and map them to their proper categorization within the taxonomy. Businesses who need assistance with this task can create and clean product data with ISV solutions prior to loading into WebSphere Commerce.
Businesses may load the taxonomy and the product information independently or combine into a single electronic data feed.
Features
- The Loader supports the creation, modification, and deletion of product information.
- The Loader can load any database table within WebSphere Commerce, including extensions with a provided schema definition XML file.
- The Loader performs ID resolution on objects for portability across multiple servers. The same object with different keys on different servers will be automatically resolved.
- The catalog import utility allows cusotmers with small simple data sets to upload CSV files that define catalog data. Websphere Commerce provides an upload capability to accept catalog CSV files.
Customization
- Utilities may be written to transform data from various data formats.
- The catalog import utility may be extended to accept complex catalog relationships and customized data.
- The catalog import utility allows cusotmers with small simple data sets to upload CSV files that define catalog data. Websphere Commerce provides an upload capability to accept catalog CSV files.
Edition
Professional, Enterprise, Express
Tasks
| Task | Description | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Create data import transform |
Since the format of externally supplied product or category data may not match WebSphere Commerce's XML-based format, WebSphere Commerce provides editors to assist the mapping of fields prior to the database load. |
Product Manager |
| Import product/category data |
The loading of the product or category data into the WebSphere Commerce database using the Loader utility. |
Product Manager |
Business artifacts
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