Overview

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.

Products 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 Products, including categories and collections.

Key Products 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.

The merchant 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.

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Workflow

Basic Products setup begins with creating attributes, then mapping fabric-mandatory attributes with merchant-defined attributes. The following workflow provides details of the steps involved in product setup:

1. Create Attributes: Create the required attributes for the products. You can also use attribute groups to group relevant attributes and assign to products or categories.
2. Map Attributes: Map the mandatory attributes of fabric, such SKU, title, image, and active status to the corresponding names provided by the merchant.
3. Add Categories: Arrange items, bundles, and variants into a hierarchical tree structure based on common attributes to logically group products.
4. Create Items, Variants, and Bundles: Add your products, which can consist of items, bundles, and variants. Prior to adding any products, fabric recommends the following:
   • Maintain a list of attributes for products and categories.
   • Organize products within a hierarchical tree structure of categories.
   • Compile a products list, along with their variants and bundles, to display on the storefront.
5. Create Collections: Organize products according to marketing needs for display on your storefront. Collections are optional.

Once these steps are complete, basic setup is finished. You may proceed to use the features and capabilities available to you.

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Navigation

Products is accessible through fabric’s cloud-based application called Copilot, and divided into the following menus and sub-menus:

• List
  • Items: Add, import, and manage product and variant information.
  • Bundles: Add, import, and manage bundle information.
• Attributes
  • Product Attributes: Define item, variant, and bundle characteristics.
  • Category Attributes: Define category characteristics.
• Categories: Create a hierarchy of product groups and relationships.
• Collections: An alternative method to categories for organizing products.
• Settings
  • Attribute Groups: Organize similar attributes together.
  • Attribute Mapping: Ensure data in Products is readable and usable to other systems.