Catalogs
A catalog contains the products available for sale in your store. A catalog also contains information about how to organize those products for navigation menus and search facets in a shopper experience.
Catalogs with Product Content Management
When using the Product Content Management (PCM) feature, before you create a catalog you define the following resources:
- Hierarchies - hierarchies and nodes for all the ways that you can categorize the products.
- Products - product information, associated assets, and links to hierarchy nodes.
- Price Books - prices for the products associated with the hierarchies.
A catalog is a combination of hierarchies and a price book.
The hierarchies determine which products appear in the catalog, that is, only the products that are associated with the selected hierarchies are included in the catalog. You can also specify the order you want your hierarchies to display in a published catalog. You can order your hierarchies on a catalog-by-catalog basis.
For more information, see Update a Catalog.
The price book contains the prices for each of the products in the catalog. For more information, see PCM Price Books API.
You can see which parent nodes a product is associated with in the breadcrumbs metadata for each product. This is useful if you want to improve how your shoppers search your store, for example. The breadcrumbs only show products associated with parent nodes. If your products are all in a hierarchy root node, no breadcrumbs metadata is generated.
An example of breadcrumbs metadata is shown below.
{
"bread_crumbs": {
"04e748f1-83db-4013-85c8-9edfb0e1b5fa": [
"e5a64eae-56c2-48cd-b8b1-f5d3be734d52",
"94b882fa-85de-470e-acb3-5b11358e02de"
],
"a96a898b-444c-40b6-9c27-5fc74d08e685": [
"e5a64eae-56c2-48cd-b8b1-f5d3be734d52"
]
}
}
The following diagram illustrates how the parent nodes are listed in the breadcrumbs.
- The product is in Node 2. The ID for Node 2 is shown first in the first array in the
breadcrumbs. - Node 2 is part of Hierarchy 1. The ID for Hierarchy 1 is shown next in the first array in the
breadcrumbs. - Node 1 is the parent node of Node 2. The ID for Node 1 is shown last in the first array in the
breadcrumbs. - The product is also in Node 3. In the second array, the ID for Node 3 is shown first.
- Node 3 is in the root of Hierarchy 1. In the second array, the ID for Hierarchy 1 is shown last.
A price book contains the prices for each of the products in the catalog. You can create multiple price books for different scenarios, such as seasonal sales, business versus retail customer pricing, and reward programs. If you have multiple price books, when a catalog is published, you can configure a priority for your price books. Product prices are displayed in the catalog according to the priority of the price books. See Create a catalog.
Use catalog rules to schedule a catalog to appear during a particular date and time, such as a seasonal catalog. The catalog may have different pricing than the other catalogs. You can have multiple published catalogs.
When a catalog is ready to be used in a store, you publish it. You can create and publish catalogs for different contexts and channels. You retrieve catalogs for your shopper experience by using the Catalog View API.
Catalogs with v2 Product resources
While catalogs were designed for use with Product Content Management services, you can use the Catalog View API to retrieve v2 Product resources. For example, you may not want to migrate v2/products to pcm/products resources, but you want to speed up requests for products. In this case, you can use the read-only Catalog View service to retrieve the products.
The returned products are in the form of the v2 Product object, which includes prices. The returned v2 Brands, Collections, and Categories are structured into separate hierarchies. For example, the v2 Brand resources appear in a single Brand hierarchy where the nodes have the same names as the Brand resources.