Overview of the Sales Catalog
Salespeople enter the products or product groups that customers are interested in purchasing by making a selection from a sales catalog. They can either browse the catalog or start typing the product name when they make entries in opportunities and leads.
The sales catalog consists of a hierarchy of product groups. This hierarchy classifies and organizes the products in your catalog. Here are some additional key points about the catalog:
- The catalog you create has a root product group and you build your catalog underneath.
- You can include a description for each product group and product.
- You can upload one image for each product.
- There is no specific limit on the number of products you can have in a product category.
- You can use product groups as a dimension in your sales territories and for sales
forecasting. During forecasting setup, you specify the number of levels in your
sales catalog product group hierarchy that you want to forecast.
For example, the fictitious Vision Corp. uses product groups to assign specialists to help close deals on opportunities. They use a line of green servers that the company has just launched. The company also creates forecasts for each server line.
- The Product Catalog page gives salespeople a simplified shopping cart experience.
They can search for a product and browse the product group hierarchy to add products
to a lead or opportunity. This screenshot highlights three product groups under the
All Categories section and also individual products in the Products
section.
- Salespeople can drill down into the individual product pages to view the product
description and an image. Here's a screenshot of the product detail page for a
sample product. The page includes the product name, the product description, and an image.
Products in the Sales Catalog
While you can create the sales catalog with product groups only, you must use products to take advantage of advanced sales features, such as price books. You must also use products to enable integrations with other Oracle cloud services, including Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote (Oracle CPQ). You can also use Application Composer to add fields and perform other modifications to products, a feature not available on product groups.
The products that you create get stored both in Sales and in the Oracle Fusion Product Model. The product model serves as the master item repository for all front-office cloud services.
For more information on the integration with the Product Model and Oracle CPQ, see the topic Sales and Service Catalogs in this guide and the topic How Sales Products and SCM Cloud Products Work Together in the Implementation Reference guide.
Sample Sales Catalog Structure
Vision Corp. sells laptops and two types of servers: Green Servers and Sentinel Servers. To create the catalog, Vision Corp.:
-
Uses Vision Products as the root product group.
-
Imports the products underneath Vision Products.
-
Imports the remaining product groups and their associations with the products.
This diagram shows the configuration of the Vision Corp. sales catalog. The sales catalog consists of the root product group, Vision Products, with two child product groups representing the product types: Servers and Laptops. There are two product groups for the server families: Green Servers, and Sentinel Servers. Each server family includes three server products. The Green Server products are: Green Server 3000, Green Server 6000, and Green Server 9000. The Sentinel Server products are: Sentinel Server 1500, Sentinel Server 3000, and Sentinel Server 7000. The Ultra Laptop product group (a child of the Laptops product group) includes these products: Ultra Z15 Laptop, Ultra Z17 Laptop, and Ultra ZX15 Laptop.
