You are here: Commerce Manager > Catalog Management

Catalog Management

The Catalog Management system provides full complement of tools and capabilities to create and manage a diverse range of products, variations, pricing strategies, languages, and related website functions.

To manage products, you can go to the back-end Commerce Manager and you will notice that products are arranged into one or more catalog(s). Catalogs are independent from one another and you may create as many catalogs as you need. Catalogs can be structured in a number of ways. For example, you may have various brands or product lines. Each brand or product line can have its own catalog. Or, a retailer may have multiple suppliers, in which case, you can segment each supplier into its own catalog.

A default B2C Sample Site along with a default electronics catalog (consisting of a Brands catalog + an Everything catalog) is included giving you a running demo site after you run the installer.

EPiServer Commerce allows you to easily and flexibly organize and categorize your products. All products referenced on a front-end site reside in a catalog created in Commerce Manager. Multiple catalogs can be created and assigned to one or more sites. The dates that each catalog will be available to the customer can also be defined. In this way, future revisions to items and pricing can be prepared easily and reviewed in advance of the release date to the site.

Catalogs can be organized into Categories, Products, SKUs, Bundles, Packages and Dynamic Packages.

Catalog and Catalog Entries

Catalogs - a catalog is a top-level container for all catalog entries such as Categories, Products and SKUs.
Categories - a Category is a grouping of purchasable products.
Products - a Product represents various forms of merchandise that you can display and purchase from the front-end site, including Products, Variations/SKUs, Bundles, Packages and Dynamic Packages.
- Product Entries - a Product Entry typically contains a product name, part number, description and images.
- Variations/SKUs - a Variation or SKU corresponds to a specific type of product with specific characteristics. For example, a shirt product will have an individual Variation/SKU which includes size, color and sleeve length.
- Bundles - a Bundle is a collection of Variations and SKUs allowing customers to purchase two or more items at once.
- Packages - a Package is comparable to an individual SKU because the Package item must be purchased as a whole (i.e. computer system).
- Dynamic Packages - a Dynamic Package is similar to the Package definition above with the added ability to configure the Package during checkout.