Sales catalogs
There are two types of catalogs in a WebSphere Commerce system: master and sales. While a master catalog is the central location to manage all your store's merchandise and services, a sales catalog is a subset of the merchandise and services found in the master catalog.
Overview
Every store in the WebSphere Commerce system must have a master catalog. Only one master catalog can exist at a time, and multiple stores can share a master catalog. However, you can create one or more sales catalogs for customer display purposes. A sales catalog has a flexible display structure that allows you to associate products to more than one category, to suit the requirements of your store.
Sales catalogs allow you to maintain an unlimited number of catalog hierarchies and place products in any number of locations within a single sales catalog structure. Sales catalogs can be used to create unique hierarchies and product assortments for seasonal purposes, targeting specific customer segments or business customers. For example, you may have a Spring sales catalog, a Fall sales catalog as well as a Gold-rated Customer sales catalog.
You can manage your sales catalog from the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator and perform the following tasks:
- Create, change, or delete sales catalogs. You can create sales catalogs based on segments of your master catalog, or choose to create one from scratch.
- Create, change, find, or remove categories. Select new parent categories and rearrange the category tree structure for a new look.
- Link a category. Take a category from one sales catalog to another sales catalog. That category, and all its catalog entries, will then be displayed in both, or more, sales catalogs.
- Duplicate the structure of a category. From your master or sales catalog, you can duplicate a section of categories and subcategories to preserve a similar structure.
- Assign, find, or remove catalog entries from different categories.
Sales catalogs can be used in conjunction with the master catalog and contracts to control which products display for a particular customer. If a customer is not entitled to see a subset of the products in the master catalog, the contract system will make sure that customer does not see those products in the WebSphere Commerce store. The sales catalog can then be used to organize the products that the customer is entitled to see and purchase in a more meaningful way. For example, customers may buy products to support a business project. Instead of organizing products by department and sub-department, it might be easier for the customer to find products when the products are arranged in a manner that matches the components of their project. In this scenario, a top level category might be titled Network Replacement Project and the subcategories in the sales catalog would be Hardware and Software.
Sales catalog tooling icons and buttons
The category tree for a catalog displays the parent categories and subcategories. With the sales catalog tooling in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, categories in the tree may have icons appearing before each category. The following table provides the name and description of the icons that may appear before categories in the catalog tree:
| Icon | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Closed category | A category in the category tree. |
| Open category | A category which has been opened or expanded to view its subcategories. |
| Closed and locked category | A closed category which has been locked. A locked category belongs to a store on the store path, but does not belong to the store you logged into. |
| Open and locked category | An open or expanded category which has been locked. A locked category belongs to a store on the store path, but does not belong to the store you logged into. |
| Link | A category which has been linked from another catalog. |
When using the sales catalog tooling, you can click one of the following buttons to instantly access dialogs:
| Button | Description |
|---|---|
| Click this button to return to the main information page for designing the sales catalog. This is the starting point when accessing the sales catalog tooling. |
| Click this button to view help information. |
| Click this button to display the category tree of the selected catalog. |
| Click this button to launch the New Category dialog and create a new category. |
| Click this button to launch the Change Category dialog and change category information. |
| Click this button to launch the Find Categories dialog and search for categories. |
Related tasks