What Are the Base Catalog Concepts?
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A catalog is a way of organizing the products you want to sell. You use catalogs to organize and manage the product data in the database for display on your site.
A base catalog is a single catalog that contains data about individual products and the categories in which they are organized. A base catalog consists of categories, products, and product families.
Before you can use base catalogs you should understand the following concepts.
Categories
A category is a container for products or sub-categories. A category is an instance of the Category type. When you create a Category object, you base it on a definition created from a CatalogDefinition object. For example, a category based on the Department category definition (which has the properties Description and Manager) may be named Hardware, and have the properties Power Tools (Description) and Frank Lee (Manager).
A category lets you to organize products in a catalog. You use the Category object to perform various operations on a category, such as adding products or other categories, managing relationships, or searching.
Products
Products are the sellable items in your catalog. A product is an instance of the Product type. When you create a Product object, you base it on a definition created from a CatalogDefinition object. You can use a Product across the Catalog System. You use a Product object to perform operations on a product, such as modifying properties or managing relationships. For information about how to create a product and add it to your catalog, see How to Add a Product.
Product Families
Product families are products that are similar or closely related. A product family is an instance of the ProductFamily type. A product family is not a sellable unit. It is a logical container for product variants.
Product Variants
A product variant is an instance of the Variant type. Product variants are sellable units. You can rank them inside a product family. Product variants are products that are similar but differ by only one or two properties. For example, suppose you have a clothing catalog with a category for shirts. A group of shirts may have the same description (soccer shirts) and manufacturer (Adventure Works), but have different sizes and colors. For example, you can create a product definition that has normal properties description and manufacturer and variant properties color and size. For more information, see CatalogDefinition.
Parent-Child Associations
You can add products and categories as children of a category in a catalog. You can rank child categories and products to control the order in which they appear on the Web site.
Relationships
You can create relationships between products and categories in one or more catalogs. You can relate a product or a category in one catalog to a product or category in the same catalog or in a different catalog. For example, in a "Books" catalog, you can relate a book in a "Fiction" category to another by the same author in the "Biography" category. You can get the related products or categories and display them to a customer. You can rank relationships.
Pricing
You can directly set the price for an individual category, product, or product variant in a base catalog. When you create a product variant, it inherits the price of the product family. You can override this price and set the price of the variant directly.
Products can inherit their price from a category. This lets you to control the price for all items in a category. You can override this pricing for each product. To do this, use the UseCategoryPricing property on the Product object to specify that the product uses category pricing. In addition, the product must have a primary parent and that parent must have a price.
Importing and Exporting
If you want to exchange catalog information with trading partners you can import the contents of a catalog from an XML file. You can export your catalogs to an XML file to share with partners. For more information about importing a catalog, see Importing Catalog Data by Using the Catalog API. For more information about exporting a catalog, see Exporting Catalog Data by Using the Catalog API.
See Also
Other Resources
Managing Catalog Definitions and Schema by Using the Catalog API