Product Catalog API - Overview

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Product Catalog Overview

Product Catalog is a data organization tool that enables merchants to build a centralized source of product information. This information can include technical specifications such as size and weight, design specifications such as color and material, and generic details such as name, description, and ID.

Product categories allow merchants to organize items into logical parent-child groups to make finding products on the storefront easier for the shoppers. While configuring products, merchants can use validations to ensure data consistency and quality for each item and category.

Product Catalog has out-of-the-box integrations with fabric services such as Orders and Offers that enable merchants to add base prices and promotions to any products available in Product Catalog, including categories and collections.

Key Product Catalog capabilities include:

• Catalog Management: Create and manage products and services such as items, variants, and bundles. For example, an item could be a coffee table in oak. A variant could be that same coffee table, but in pine. A bundle could be the coffee table sold together with two matching end tables.
• Taxonomy Management: Define categories of products to create a structured hierarchy.
• Distribution management: Control product data availability for multiple channels and locales and use collections to curate subsets of products for sales and marketing goals, such as holiday sales or seasonal discounts.
• Bulk Management: Import product, category, and collection information in a CSV file and export catalog data into a CSV file.
• Variant management: Create and manage an unlimited number of variants to indicate that a product is available in different options, such as colors or sizes.

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Use Case

As an example, consider a furniture distributor with an extensive catalog that includes living, dining, and bedroom pieces who wants to display their products for sale on their storefront.

The merchant can upload each item they sell, either individually or in bulk with a CSV file. Attributes of each piece, ranging from physical characteristics such as dimensions and weight to construction characteristics such as materials and finishes can all be included. Variants of items are also supported, so that a coffee table available in mahogany, oak, and pine can all be considered different versions of the same item. In addition, items frequently sold together can be grouped into bundles so that the coffee table can be sold along with a pair of matching end tables.

The merchant can then create a hierarchy of relationships among the items in the catalog that make the most sense to their business. That means the coffee table could be in a category with all living room furniture, or a category of all tables, or both.

Merchants can group items from different categories into themed collections to boost the sales or marketing campaigns. For example, for a Black Friday promotion, merchant can assemble a living room set collection that includes a coffee table, end tables, sofa, loveseat, and lamps.