Overview

Products are the items or services that you might want to sell in your store. In Product Experience Manager, a product has a name, description, ID, and SKU. Products can also have additional attributes and associated rich media assets, such as product images or a file containing additional product details. If your store supports multiple languages, you can localize product names and descriptions.

Product data is stored in a database. After you add products, you can update product information, add images and other assets, and associate products with one or more hierarchy nodes. You can export the updated product information back to other business systems so that your organization sees a consistent view of products.

While defining products, the products are in a draft state. Your organization can develop the criteria and business processes to help determine when a product is ready to go live and appear in a catalog.

To appear in a catalog, a product must meet the following criteria:

The product is live.
The product is associated with at least one hierarchy.
The catalog references a hierarchy that includes the product.

Product Types

Commerce automatically assigns types to the products you create. In Commerce Manager, you can see at a glance the product types in a list of a products. In addition, you can filter on product types in both the API and Commerce Manager.

Product types can also be used in catalogs. For example, in your catalog, you can filter on parent so that only your parent products are displayed in your storefront.

Products have one of the following types:

standard - Standard products are a standalone products.
parent - A parent product is a product that has child products that have been built in Commerce Manager or using the Build Child Products endpoint.
child - When you configure product variations and variation options for parent products, the child products derived from the parent products are automatically created in Commerce.
bundle - A bundle is a purchasable product, comprising one or more standalone products (in other words, components) to be sold together.

note

In Commerce Manager, standard products are called Product.

Products and Catalog Releases

For a product to appear in the store, the product must be in a live state. By default, a product is created in the draft state. This is to ensure that the product details are reviewed and approved before publishing it. When you publish a catalog, only the live products appear in the catalog release. If you change a product's state to live, you must republish the catalog for the product to be displayed in the catalog.

In addition, a product must belong to at least one hierarchy. When you publish a catalog, the live products in the hierarchies appear in a catalog release. A catalog can have one or more hierarchies of products. The hierarchies contain all the products that you want to display in your store. Only the products that are associated with nodes in the selected hierarchies are included in the catalog. You can create your hierarchies and nodes when configuring your products.