Product Advisor
The Product Advisor is a tool used to create an interactive online product catalog that provides customers with different ways of finding what they want, called shopping metaphors. Customers with little knowledge of a product category can use the Guided Sell metaphor, which guides them toward appropriate products through a series of questions and answers. Those with more knowledge can use the Product Exploration metaphor, which lets them select desired product features from a list. Once the selection has been narrowed down through either of the methods mentioned previously, customers can use the Product Comparison metaphor to compare similar products side by side. The Product Advisor checks each customer's entitlement, and only displays search results that the customer is entitled to view.
There are two search methods available for use with the Product Advisor. The first method requires additional tables added to the database to reformat existing product data to enable optimized parametric searches, which are focused on individual categories. This method is called the separate search space because the category and attribute information is separated from the base database tables. The second method is called the base search space because it has been designed to search the WebSphere Commerce database that is created during instance configuration. Both search spaces require some additional attribute metadata be populated in the Product Advisor tables in the database. Create search space using WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or using the command utilities. The Product Advisor includes commands utilities to help automate the process of creating either search space. You must create an XML file to use as input to the command utility to meet your requirements.
Once you create the required search spaces, you can create metaphors from WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or using the command utilities.
A metaphor created for a category is applicable only to that category and not to the subcategory. You must create a new metaphor for the subcategory. When creating a metaphor for a category, the products of that category must have common attributes for comparison and search. This ensures meaningful results when using the Product Comparison and Product Exploration metaphors.
If you use the separate search space, existing information in the database is copied and reformatted into separate tables specific to the search space. This reformatting means that updates to your product require that the information be propagated to the additional tables. This process is performed by the tools most commonly used to update product data, including the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, the massload utility, and the messaging subsystem. If you update the product data using another method, you will have to call these commands manually.
- Create search space for Product Advisor
Prepare metaphors
- Create a Product Comparison metaphor
- Create a Product Exploration metaphor
- Create a Guided Sell for a category
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