Operate > WebSphere Commerce Accelerator
Product Management tools
The Product Management tools in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator allow you to manage the products in the store's master catalog using various wizards and notebooks. You can also use the Product Management dynamic table, which allows you to update the catalog entry information directly.
- Work with categories
A category, also known as a catalog group, is used to group products and services offered by the store. You can create, find, list, change, and delete categories. You can classify products and SKUs under different parent categories.
- Work with catalog entries
There are several types of catalog entries: products, SKUs, bundles and kits.
- Attachments
Attachments are used in all areas of Web applications. An attachment is additional material that you can send in an e-mail, a request, or a detailed product specification. Attachments can be images files, text files, or documents.
- 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 the store's merchandise and services, a sales catalog is a subset of the merchandise and services found in the master catalog.
- Catalog data in CSV format
After creating a store, a merchant needs to load the catalog data into the database.
- Merchandising associations
Merchandising associations suggest additional, different, or replacement products based on a selected catalog entry. The merchandising associations are used as a product recommendation strategy to increase store sales. In addition to promotional associations such as cross-selling, up-selling, and suggested accessories, key words highlight extra semantic information of merchandising relationships, such as requires and comes with. The behavior of these semantics is determined by the store's specific business requirements and does not perform any business logic by default. For example, one store may decide that require automatically adds a product to the shopping cart, while another simply displays a message to the customer.
- Vendors
A vendor is any organization from which a store purchases merchandise. The vendor record includes information about the vendor, such as name, address, and contact information. Vendors must be created before the store can create expected inventory records.
- 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.
Related concepts
Related tasks