You may want to maintain your catalogs in an external system and use that content as a basis for your product catalogs, which are organized into repository data sets. The way you approach exporting this content depends largely on the system that currently holds your content and the data itself. Consult your third-party system documentation for exporting instructions. The Oracle Commerce Core platform includes two importing tools:

You can also write your own import code. Keep in mind that the XML files parsed by the startSQLRepository script are easier to write than their Repository Loader counterparts, however, running the Repository Loader uses less memory than the startSQLRepository script.

It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with repositories in general by reading through the Introduction and Repository API chapters of the Repository Guide as well as the documentation on the commerce repositories available to you. The commerce repositories are described in the Using and Extending the Product Catalog chapter of this guide. Learning about the repositories you’ll use will help you understand the format required by the Core Platform importing tools, and planning your data organization strategy will minimize the amount of manual tweaking you will need to do later. The Core Commerce repositories are extensible, so you have the option of changing them if they do not offer the properties or item types your product catalog requires.

Once you generate the export files, import your content into Core Commerce using the tool you prefer.