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Elastic Path Product Importer

Elastic Path Product Importer

EP Product Importer can import product catalogs (products, variants and category information) maintained in either Elastic Path or third-party PIM/MDM systems. EP Product Importer can group products in AEM according to business needs. For example, in Elastic Path Commerce Engine you can organize your products under a category and the imported products will be grouped in AEM JCR nodes.

EP Product Importer Features

EP Product Importer supports Full Import and Incremental Import. Full Import either creates a new product catalog or overwrites the existing product catalog. Incremental Import only updates the products that were changed since the last Full Import or Incremental Import.

Use Full Import for the following scenarios:
  • The first time you import the product catalog into AEM.
  • When you make changes that impact products groupings. For example, a product moves from one parent node to another.
  • When you delete a product or a SKU from your product catalog.

Use Incremental Import for the following scenarios:

  • You updated a product or a SKU that you want to bring into AEM.
  • You created a new product that you want to bring into AEM.

EP Product Importer Limitations

The EP Product Importer has the following limitations:
  • As EP Product Importer is created using AEM Commerce Integration Framework, customers need to understand the Adobe Commerce API's limitations and be able to work around them.
  • Product changes made in AEM are overwritten during import. EP Product Importer assumes product catalogs maintained in either Commerce Engine or another PIM/MDM system are the master catalogs.
  • EP Product Importer does not come with the component required to export data from Elastic Path Commerce Engine or another PIM/MDM system. Exporting data from EP or PIM/MDM is a customer project implementation.
  • EP Product Importer is created to import a product catalog with a structure similar to the Geometrixx Outdoors product catalog. Therefore, a catalog with a different structure will require EP Product Importer customizations to properly import the catalog.
  • Multi-language product catalogs are not supported.
  • AEM Touch-Optimized UI is not supported.
  • Multi-node author environment is not supported.

EP Product Importer Image Management

The EP Product Importer is able to import product and variant images into the DAM, and create JCR image nodes under the associated product and variant nodes that point to the DAM images. This is the pattern that was used in Adobe's Geometrixx catalog and is supported for backward compatibility. A key limitation of the Geometrixx model is that only one image could be defined per product or variant.

Starting with Elastic Path Commerce 7.0, image management is no longer considered to be a commerce responsibility. Instead images and other assets should be managed directly in the DAM or in another asset management solution.

The relationship beween EP catalog entities and images can be implemented in two ways:

  • By convention - the image names in the DAM are constructed in a consistent way from the EP product code or SKU code so that no configuration is required.
  • By configuration - images are defined as image attributes for EP products and SKUs. Multiple images can be defined using multiple image attributes.