ATG Merchandising User Guide

When you design your commerce Web site, you decide whether you want your site to have one catalog viewed by all users (standard) or multiple catalogs, each designed for a particular audience (custom). For example, a site might use multiple catalogs to accommodate the following situations:

For more information on standard and custom catalogs, see the ATG Commerce Programming Guide.

All features provided in standard catalogs are also available in custom catalogs. Custom catalogs provide additional features.

In the standard catalog model, a catalog is a general concept that represents the container for your categories, products, and SKUs. Customers who use custom catalogs see additional asset types in ATG Merchandising called catalogs and catalog folders that they can use to define and organize separate catalogs tailored to the needs of specific site users. In the custom catalog model, you can move assets from one catalog to another or link most assets across catalogs, the only limitation being that categories and sub-catalogs must be unique to a catalog. Also, customers using custom catalogs have properties used to display catalog-specific information for categories, products, and SKUs.

Pricing is handled differently in custom catalogs. In a standard catalog, each SKU can have several prices—a sale price and a wholesale price, for example. In general one price is active at a time for all customers. In custom catalogs, however, prices for various products or SKUs are organized into price lists that are visible to visitors who are part of a given organization. Price lists can use a complex pricing scheme that alters the price of a SKU based on the number of items being purchased. For more information, see Working with Prices.

Standard and custom catalogs are features of the ATG Consumer Commerce and ATG Business Commerce products that you use in conjunction with ATG Merchandising. By default, ATG Consumer Commerce uses standard catalogs and ATG Business Commerce uses custom catalogs, but you can alter the default configurations.