Tips on Testing Personalized Catalog Views
When you click Save, Save & Preview or Save & View on the Customer Segments Manager page, the search index for the website is reindexed. When the reindexing is complete, the personalized catalog views become active and customers visiting your website are shown the personalized catalog view applicable to them. Making an item segment visible to a customer segment from a customer group record or an item collection record has the same effect.
Though you can use SuiteAnalytics Workbooks and SMT Advanced Preview to verify that PCV has been set up correctly, this is possible only after saving the personalized catalog views. Therefore, it is advisable to test the personalized catalog views in a way that does not affect the production website. There are two ways to test:
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Use test customer segments - to make certain items visible or purchasable only to selected customers, you can add test customers to your customer groups and set up PCV as you would do for real customers. Make sure that the Unmapped Items segment is set to Display Fully. This ensures that all real customers can see all items other than those you have mapped to the test customers. After you have logged in as a test customer and checked that the correct items are visible, you can add real customers to the customer group.
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Publish to a test website – if you have a more complex PCV plan, it is better to test the setup in a sandbox account and publish to a test website to make sure the correct customers have access to the correct items.