Managing Product Relationships & Associations
With Product Experience Manager, you define your product data separately from catalogs, pricing, inventory, and other resource relationships. This means that products are standalone objects that can be linked to various other entities including price books books and hierarchies.
| Relationship | Function | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Price Books | Price Books manage the prices assigned to products. | A product can be associated with multiple price books, allowing for dynamic pricing across different channels or customer segments. By separating pricing from the products themselves, it becomes easier to manage different pricing strategies, regional pricing, discounts, and promotional pricing without duplicating product data. |
| Hierarchies & Nodes | Hierarchies organize products into nodes, or category structures. | Products are associated with one or more hierarchies, which organize them for display in the appropriate catalogs. This separation allows for flexible organization and categorization of products, making it simpler to manage and navigate large product catalogs; essential for multi-channel, multi-geo product management. |
| Media & Files | Rich Media assets include images and files linked to products. | Products can have associated media assets, such as images and spec sheets, which are automatically updated across all associated catalogs when product data is modified. Separating media allows for centralized management of images and other media files, ensuring that updates are reflected across all associated products. |
| Templates | Templates define the structure and attributes of products. | Using templates standardizes the product creation process, making it easier to ensure consistency and to apply updates across multiple products. Templates can be reused for multiple products by enabling optional attribute fields. |
| Variations | Variations manage different data for different versions of products, such as size and color. | Keeping variations separate allows for more efficient management of product options, by applying common attributes for parent products to all child products, and using a variation builder to create or amend child products. |
| Promotions | Promotions apply discounts and special offers to products. | Separating promotions from product data allows for the dynamic application of promotions without altering the core product information. |
| Subscriptions | Subscription products allow for recurring billing and subscription management. | Managing subscription data separately from product data allows for more flexible subscription offerings and easier updates to subscription terms and conditions. |
A gaming store sells digital video games with attributes for content rating, available languages, game type and compatability can be stored in a shared template. Games can be sold as standalone games, as part of a gaming bundle, or through a subscription service. They sell games in the UK, Canada and Mexico, with a catalog for each region.
The Canada and Mexico storefronts can only sell games that are available in French and Spanish respectively, and the Mexico store has restrictions on a particular saleability of a specific character series. They can create separate hierarchies with respective games for each region, and pair them together to create each corresponding catalog. The separation of data allows them to do this without the need to duplicate or maintain any individual product data for those games.