Master catalog
The master catalog is the central location to manage your store's merchandise. Everything you need in your store is contained within the master catalog. It is the single catalog containing all products, items, relationships, and standard prices for everything that is for sale in your store. To view a diagram of a master catalog, refer to this example.
Every store in the WebSphere Commerce system must have a master catalog. You can share the master catalog across stores and define as many stores as needed.
In addition to creating a master catalog for your catalog management, you may also choose to create one or more sales catalogs for display purposes. A sales catalog may contain the same entries as the master catalog, but with a much more flexible structure for customer display purposes. You can have as many sales catalogs as you want. Refer to Sales catalogs for more information.
Use the Product Management tools in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to view and manage your master catalog. Important structural restrictions for the master catalog:
- The master catalog must be a proper tree, which means that there are no cycles. You must avoid the following type of scenario: The parent category A has a subcategory B. It is important that B and any of B's subcategories are not the parent category of A.
- A product cannot belong to more than one category. To place a product in more than one category, use a sales catalog.
- The Product Management tools only work with products that are associated with a master catalog.
Related concepts
Catalog subsystem
Catalog navigationRelated tasks
Create a master catalog
Use the Sales Catalog tooling on the master catalog