Manage Your Catalog

Understand Catalogs

A catalog organizes your products, SKUs, and collections in a hierarchy that reflects the way users will navigate to them on your store.

A catalog contains collections, which in turn, contain products.

By default, Retail Digital Commerce includes a single catalog called Product Catalog, where you can create all the collections, products, and SKUs available to your store. There are times, though, when you might want to provide shoppers with a more customized shopping experience by creating additional catalogs. You can create and assign additional catalogs in the following instances:

Multiple stores: You can run multiple stores (called sites) from a single instance of Retail Digital Commerce. Each site has a unique domain and you can assign each site its own catalog. For example, suppose you sell soccer jerseys. You could create a separate store for each team whose jerseys you sell. You would assign each store a catalog that contains only products for that team. Fans could easily find and purchase their team’s gear without having to sift through merchandise for other teams. For details about running multiple sites, see Run Multiple Stores from One Retail Digital Commerce Instance.
Account-based stores: Retail Digital Commerce lets you create accounts for companies that do business with you, such as manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. You can provide each account with a catalog that meets its specific business requirements. It is unlikely that all account-based shoppers will need to purchase all products your store sells, so providing an account with its own focused catalog makes it easier for those shoppers to find and purchase the right products. Logged-in contacts who shop on your store can see and purchase only the products in the catalog associated with their account. For details about creating and managing accounts, see Configure Business Accounts.
Rules set by an external system. By default, Retail Digital Commerce assigns catalogs and price groups to sites or, for account-based commerce, to accounts. However, you might want to override these default assignments with different catalogs and price groups for each registered shopper. For example, you can personalize the catalog and prices a shopper sees based on geographic location or level in a loyalty program. For more information, see Assign Catalogs and Price Groups to Shoppers.

Retail Digital Commerce lets you create the following types of catalogs:

Independent catalogs are catalogs that are not dependent on any other catalog in your environment. Collections you add to an independent catalog can be exclusive to that catalog, or can be linked to a number of different catalogs. The Product Catalog that Retail Digital Commerce includes by default is structured as an independent catalog. See Work with independent catalogs for more information.
Filtered catalogs provide custom views into the Product Catalog. Filtered catalogs let you add products to a catalog without defining collections in that catalog hierarchy. See Work with filtered catalogs for more information.

Work with Independent Catalogs

Independent catalogs are catalogs that are not dependent on any other catalog, including the Product Catalog that is included with Retail Digital Commerce.

An independent catalog can contain links to collections and products that are already in other catalogs, or it can contain collections and products that are not associated with any other catalogs.

All catalogs you create in the Retail Digital Commerce user interface are independent catalogs. (You must use the Admin API to create filtered catalogs. See Work with Filtered Catalogs for more information.)

Understand Independent Catalog Structure

You can perform all catalog-related tasks on any independent catalog:

View details for a product or a collection.
Create a new product or collection.
Link an existing product or collection.
Edit or delete an existing product or collection.
Rearrange products in a collection or rearrange collection hierarchy.
Access the following options from the Manage Catalogs menu: Product Types, Price Groups, Inventory, and Upload Media.

Any changes you make to linked collections and products are automatically applied to all independent catalogs that are linked to the items that were changed. See Link and Unlink Collections and Products for more information. Remember that you must publish any changes you make to catalogs before they will appear on your stores.

Create Independent Catalogs

This section describes the steps you must complete to create a new independent catalog and add or link collections to it.

To create a new independent catalog:

On the Catalog page, click Manage Catalogs and select New Catalog.
Enter values for the Catalog Name and Catalog ID.
You cannot change the Catalog ID once you create the catalog.
Click Create.

To add or link collections to a catalog:

Click the Collections link on the left-hand side of the catalog’s details page.
Click Edit.
Select a collection from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting some text in the Collections box.
The filter control matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the name or ID, not just at the beginning. Usually, as you type more characters, there are fewer matches. When you see the item you want, select it.

Note:

Selecting a child collection does not add its parent collections to the catalog.
Click Add Selected.
Click Done when you finish adding collections.
(Optional) You can specify a default collection where Retail Digital Commerce creates products that have no parents, for example, products that come in on a feed. Click the Select Collection button and select a collection from this catalog.
If you do not select a default collection, Retail Digital Commerce creates products with no parents in Unassigned Collections.
Click Save when you finish making changes.
Publish your changes. See Publish Changes for more information.

Edit and Delete Independent Catalogs

You can change a catalog’s name and associated collections; you cannot change its ID. You can delete a catalog that is not associated with any sites or accounts. You can delete any additional catalogs that you created, but you cannot delete the Product Catalog that is included with Retail Digital Commerce.

Important:

Deleting assets, such as products, catalogs, shipping methods, and so on, can result in discrepancies in your system, which may produce errors. It is recommended that you disable assets instead of delete them.

To edit or delete a catalog:

Select the catalog to edit or delete in one of the following ways:
- On the Catalog page, select a catalog from the drop-down list at the top of the catalog page to display the catalog.
- On the Catalog page, click the Manage Catalogs button and select All Catalogs. Click the name of the catalog you want to edit.
To edit the catalog, click Edit Catalog, then change the catalog name or its collections. Click Save when you finish making changes.
To delete the catalog, click Edit Catalog, then click the Delete button.
If the catalog is already associated with accounts or sites, you must first remove it from all accounts or sites before you can delete it. See Work with Account Contracts for information about removing a catalog from an account. See Configure Sites for information about associating catalogs with sites.

You cannot delete a catalog that is the base catalog for a filtered catalog.

Work with Filtered Catalogs

A filtered catalog provides a filtered view of an existing independent catalog.

Filtered catalogs let merchants scale to a larger number of catalogs with less work and provide flexibility for merchants who sell to a number of accounts or in a number of countries. Filtered catalogs provide central management of collections and taxonomies and give merchants fine-grained control of account-level availability of products.

While independent catalogs can contain different collections and products, a filtered catalog references only products and collections that are already in its base independent catalog; you can, however, show or hide selected products from within the filtered view.

You must create the first new filtered catalog in your Retail Digital Commerce instance with the Admin API or via import. Once you have created the initial catalog, you can work with filtered catalogs on the Catalog page in the administration interface.

You can assign filtered catalogs to sites or, if your store supports account-based commerce, to business accounts. You assign filtered catalogs in the same way you assign independent catalogs. See Associate catalogs with sites or accounts for details.

Understand the Benefits of Filtered Catalogs

Because filtered catalogs let merchants scale to a larger number of catalogs and reduce manual duplication of effort, they are useful for merchants who share catalog taxonomies (collection hierarchies) across catalogs but want to have unique product membership per account or site.

This section describes two cases where a merchant would benefit from using filtered catalogs.

An account-based merchant has one large main catalog that contains all the products the merchant sells.

The merchant sells to a large number of accounts and assigns the full main catalog to about two-thirds of them. Each of the remaining accounts requires a catalog that contains a subset of the products from the main catalog.

The merchant can set up a filtered view of the main catalog for each remaining account. Each filtered view has the same taxonomy as the main catalog, but contains only the products that are appropriate for the account to which it is assigned. For example, 70% of the products from the main catalog can be marked as core products that are available in all the filtered views. The remaining products can be tagged as needed on a per-view basis.
A merchant has two main catalogs, one for sales in Europe and one for sales in North America. They have country store sites for Spain, Germany, UK, France, Italy, the US, Canada, and Mexico.

To avoid the need to recreate the hierarchy for each country catalog, the merchant creates a filter view catalog based on the European catalog for each of the following country stores: Spain, Germany, UK, France, and Italy.

Similarly, the merchant creates filtered catalogs based on the North American catalog for Canada and Mexico. (The US store uses the full North Amercann catalog.)

The entire Wellness collection is not available in Spain, so a business user can hide all products from this collection in the filtered view for the Spanish site. After the user publishes the changes, the Wellness collection no longer appears in the menu for the Spanish site. Three products in the Nail Polish collection are not available for sale in Germany due to ingredients restrictions. The business user can navigate to the Nail Polish Collection in the German filtered view and hide the three products that are not available in Germany. Once the user publishes the changes, the user will see that three nail polishes are no longer showing up in the Nail Polish Collection on the German site.

Similarly, the entire Footspa collection is not available in Canada, so a business user can hide all products from this collection in the Canadian filtered view of the North American catalog.

Keep in mind that performance can be impacted if each filtered view contains a large number of non-core products. The best approach to filtered views is to have a set of core products and filter out by exception.

Understand the Structure of Filtered Catalogs

There are a number of tasks that you cannot perform in filtered catalogs. You can perform the following tasks only in the independent catalog that the filtered view is based on:

Create a new product or collection.
Edit or delete an existing product or collection.
Rearrange products in a collection or rearrange collection hierarchy.
Work with product types, price groups, inventory, and media.

Any changes you make in a base independent catalog are automatically applied to the filtered views that include the items that were changed. Remember that you must publish your changes before they will appear on your stores.

Create a Filtered Catalog

The administration interface supports creating independent catalogs only. To create filtered catalogs, you must use the Admin API.

Note:

You can also create new filtered catalogs by using the CSV import feature. See Import catalog items and inventory to learn how to create filtered catalogs by importing.

To create a catalog, you can use the createCatalog endpoint in the Admin API. The catalogVersion and baseCatalog properties specify that you are creating a filtered catalog:

Set the value of catalogVersion to 3 to specify that the createCatalog endpoint should create a filtered catalog.
The value of baseCatalog must be the catalog ID of an existing independent (version 2) catalog. Otherwise, the request returns an error.

The createCatalog request cannot associate collections with the new filtered catalog. If the request includes categoryIds, an error is returned.

The following example uses the createCatalog endpoint to create a filtered catalog:

POST /ccadmin/v1/catalogs  HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
x-ccasset-language: en

{
  "catalogVersion": 3,
  "catalogId": "catSpain",
  "displayName": "Spain",
  "baseCatalog": "catEuro"
}

The response returns the properties of the catalog:

{
  "catalogVersion": 3,
  "defaultCategoryForProducts": null,
  "baseCatalog": {
    "catalogVersion": 2,
    "defaultCategoryForProducts": {
      "repositoryId": "cat40013"
    },
    "rootNavigationCategory": {
      "repositoryId": "rootCategory"
    },
    "displayName": "European Main Catalog",
    "repositoryId": "catEuro",
    "rootCategories": [
      {
        "repositoryId": "nonNavigableCategory"
      },
      {
        "repositoryId": "rootCategory"
      }
    ],
    "id": "catEuro"
  },
  "displayName": "Spain",
  "repositoryId": "catSpain",
  "rootCategories": [],
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "href": "http://myserver.example.com:9080/ccadmin/v1/catalogs"
    }
  ],
  "id": "catSpain"
}

After creating a catalog, you must publish your changes to make it available to use on your sites. See Publish Changes for more information.

Understand Product Membership in Filtered Catalogs

The updateProductMembership endpoint enables and disables membership of products to linked filtered catalogs. Use this endpoint to perform the following tasks:

Specify products as core products, which will automatically become members of all linked filtered catalogs unless explicitly excluded. Whenever a new filtered catalog is created, it will automatically contain all its base catalog's core products.
Exclude core products from specific filtered catalogs.
Include products that are not core products in specific filtered catalogs.

The updateProductMembership endpoint's properties specify how products are assigned to filtered catalogs.

catalogId is an optional property that specifies a catalog context for the request. Only filtered catalogs that are linked to the specified can be updated by the request.
coreProduct is a Boolean that specifies whether products are core products. If the value of this property is null, the existing core-product status of the products will not change.
filteredCatalogs is a list of filtered catalog IDs that will include or exclude the products, depending on the products' coreProduct values.
enableMembership is a Boolean that adds or removes products to the catalogs specified by filteredCatalogs. If the request does not include the catalogId property, then the catalogs specified by this property will explicitly replace existing values and will be treated as inclusive or exclusive depending on whether a product is a core product. If the request does include the catalogId property, then only the filtered catalogs linked to that catalog are replaced. Other filtered catalogs that contain the product remain unchanged.

The following sample adds camera_1 and camcorder_1 to the filtered catalogs myFilteredView1 and myFilteredView3. These products are not core products.

POST /ccadmin/v1/products/membership  HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer <access_token>
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "filteredCatalogs":[
        "myFilteredView1",
        "myFilteredView3"
    ],
    "enableMembership":true,
    "products":[
        "camera_1",
        "camcorder_1"
    ],
    "coreProduct":false
}

Associate Catalogs with Sites or Accounts

Once you have created and published a catalog, it is ready to be associated with one or more sites. If your Retail Digital Commerce environment supports account-based commerce, you can also associate published catalogs with accounts.

You can assign independent catalogs to sites and accounts. See Understand Catalogs for information about the independent catalogs.

See Configure Sites for information about creating a new site and associating a default catalog with it. See Work with Account Contracts for information about associating a catalog with an account.

Edit Catalog Items Without Publishing

Direct catalog editing allows you to update your live catalog and web site without running through publishing steps.

This feature is not designed to be turned on and off. We recommend you choose the publishing strategy that makes sense for your business based on a number of factors, including how large your catalog is and its source, how often you will need to make changes to it (high frequency/volume of publishes), and the organization of your team.

By default, when you create or modify catalog items, the changes you make must be published before they take effect. However, you can optionally configure Retail Digital Commerce so that you can make changes to the following catalog items directly on the storefront without publishing:

Catalogs (not including catalog media)
Product types
Collections
Products and add-on products
SKU and SKU bundles

Publishing catalog changes works well for many merchants, particularly those that change their catalogs relatively infrequently. Some merchants, however, have a large number of products and update their catalogs frequently, in some cases updating them every day or multiple times a day. For these merchants, Retail Digital Commerce provides the ability to make catalog changes available on the storefront immediately, bypassing the publishing process.

Enabling the direct catalog editing feature means:

You can immediately display any changes without the need to publish.
You can directly push your entire catalog data to production by avoiding the publishing step. This is particularly useful when changes to products, collections, or SKUs occur frequently.
Search content updates run every 15 minutes to ensure the search index is up-to-date.

Consider direct catalog editing if you are getting catalog data from an external system, such as a supplier or a PIM, and passing that data through without requiring users to make changes to that catalog data; or if you frequently publish a large number of items or assets. You may also want to consider it if you are concerned about publishing times, which increase when changes affect a large number of assets, and/or when there is a high volume of product catalog changes.

You might also want to use direct editing if you are concerned about lockout, since during a publishing event, users cannot work with administration interface tools. This feature may also be helpful if you have distributed teams, with a number of individuals publishing throughout the day and/or from multiple time zones.

Direct catalog editing is not designed to be turned on and off, and as such, you should consider this process to be part of your environment. Because this feature is working with a live production site, you should carefully consider whether direct catalog editing is something that you want to enable.

Understand Additional Considerations when using Direct Catalog Editing

Choosing to use direct catalog editing and bypassing the publishing process comes with some trade-offs, including:

You will not be able to preview any changes you make before they are in production.
Search indexing runs every fifteen minutes, which might result in a lag between when changes go live and when that changed is indexed and appears in any search or navigation results.
Product recommendations do not immediately reflect direct catalog edits. Instead, the recommendations service exports the catalog daily in order to generate product recommendations, which can mean that the products returned may be up to 24 hours old.

Important:

Enabling direct catalog editing automatically enables direct price editing. For more information about direct price editing, see Update prices without publishing. (You can choose to use direct price editing on its own, even if you choose to use the default publishing process for catalog changes.)

Since direct catalog editing is not designed to be turned on and off, you should consider whether or not it makes sense to use this feature, ideally during your site implementation as you are thinking through your business processes. Because this feature is working with a live production site, you should carefully consider whether direct catalog editing is something that you want to enable.

Perform Prerequisite Checks

There are a few things that you should check before enabling and disabling direct catalog editing:

There are no items in the search indexing queue.
If your stores have any unpublished catalog or price changes, you must publish them before attempting to enable direct catalog editing. Additionally, make sure no imports or publishing events are happening while you are enabling direct catalog editing.
Your site's URL patterns are using IDs to specify products and collections.

Note that the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint will perform the necessary validations and return the appropriate errors.

Update your Catalog without Publishing

To update your catalog directly without publishing, enable direct catalog editing using the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint.

For example:

PUT /ccadmin/v1/merchant/directEdit/catalog
{
  "enable" : true
}

Use direct catalog editing

If you create or modify a catalog item when direct catalog editing is enabled, (using the administration interface, an endpoint, or an import process) the changes you make are available on the storefront without publishing; they do not appear in the list of changes that are returned by REST endpoints or appear in the Publishing page of the administration interface (although the data that is live on the site is reflected and editable in the administration interface tool elsewhere).

When you publish changes, Retail Digital Commerce initiates an indexing operation so the search index is updated to reflect the changes. However, with direct catalog editing, catalog items on the production server can be changed without publishing, which means catalog items in the index may become out of date. See Manage Search Settings for more information.

To ensure the index is kept up-to-date, enabling direct catalog editing enables a schedule that performs incremental indexing every 15 minutes. Performing a publishing operation does not trigger an index when direct catalog editing is enabled. However, if you have already used the setSearchPartialSchedule endpoint in the Search Data and Indexing API to set up a different incremental indexing schedule, that schedule will remain in place instead.

Note:

When bulk import is running, you will notice that storefront performance is slower because bulk import requires continual purging and invalidation of the storefront cache. Refer to Perform Bulk Export and Import for additional information.

Disable direct catalog editing

Before disabling direct catalog edit, refer to Perform prerequisite checks for more information.

You can disable direct catalog editing by using the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint to set the enable property back to false. Doing so initiates a full publishing process.

It is worth noting, however, that you should decide which mode makes most sense for your store, and continue to use that mode unless your business needs change. The feature is not designed to be turned on and off frequently. Disabling direct catalog editing may cause a considerable delay, because Retail Digital Commerce must then synchronize your publishing server with the catalog on your production server.

After disabling direct catalog editing, direct price editing remains enabled, as does incremental indexing. If you then turn off direct price editing, incremental indexing is canceled.

However, if you used the setSearchPartialSchedule endpoint to create a different incremental indexing schedule, disabling catalog editing does not cancel that schedule unless you have set the parseString parameter to "* * * * * 0,15,30,45".

Understand Scheduled Site Map Generation

Site maps are generated nightly and direct catalog editing does not modify that behavior.

Note:

All site maps are updated, even if your catalog updates only impact a small number of your overall site maps.

Create and Edit Product Types

Product types are templates for products you add to your catalog.

Product types contain properties that describe a product, such as fabric type or available colors. They can also optionally contain properties that request shopper input, such as the message to include with a gift or the initials to use for a monogram. When a merchandiser creates a new product, the properties available to fill out depend on the product type they select.

Understand the Base Product Type

The built-in base product type contains basic product and SKU properties that apply to all products and SKUs in your catalog. Custom product types automatically inherit all the base product type’s properties.

The following table describes the default product properties for the base product type:

Property	Description
Name (required)	Short, descriptive name that identifies the product.
Product ID (required)	The ID that identifies the product internally. Each product ID must be unique within your catalog.
Description	A short description to display with the product.
Brand	The name of the manufacturer.
List Price (required)	Default price of the product before any discounts or promotions. If your store supports more than one currency, enter a list price for each price group shown. See Configure Price Groups for more information.
Sale Price	Sale price of the product. If your store supports more than one currency, enter a sale price for each price group shown. See Configure Price Groups for more information.
Shipping Surcharge	Additional shipping charges that apply to the product because of size, weight, or special handling. If your store supports more than one currency, enter a shipping surcharge for each price group shown. See Configure Price Groups for more information.
Product Tax Code	A tax code to assign to the product that allows your tax processor to make the appropriate tax calculations. For more information, see Configure Tax Processing.
Long Description	Detailed descriptive text to display with the product. The long description is created with an HTML editor called CKEditor that you can use to edit and apply rich-text formatting.
Active	Specifies whether the product is displayed on your store and in search results. By default, the Active option is not selected.
Discountable	Specifies whether the product can be discounted by Retail Digital Commerce promotions. By default, the Discountable option is selected. For more information, see Understand promotion targets.
Not For Individual Sale	Specifies whether the product can be purchased only as part of a complex, customizable product. For example, if your store sells laptops, some of the individual components such as motherboards or graphics cards may not be for sale as individual products but can be sold as component parts of a customized product. Products marked as not for individual sale do not appear in collections shoppers browse on your store or in search results. Unlike inactive products, which shoppers cannot purchase at all, products marked as not for individual sale can be purchased, but only as a component of a customizable product. By default, the Not For Individual Sale option is not selected.
Not Returnable	Indicates that the storefront elements allowing shoppers to initiate a return from their order history should not be active for this product.
Exclude from XML Sitemap	Excludes selected products from the product sitemap. The XML sitemap is an index of page URLs on your site that is available for crawling by search engines. It helps search engines to crawl your site more intelligently.
Assetable	Indicates that the product should be tracked as an asset. Prior to checkout, Retail Digital Commerce will require shoppers to assign customer, service, and billing account details for this product, along with a billing profile. Select this property only for products sold as services or subscriptions such as broadband, wireless, or magazine subscriptions.
Shippable	Specifies that the product is a physical item that can be shipped. By default, the Shippable option is selected. Deselect it if the product is something that will not be shipped, such as a service.
Arrival Date	Stock arrival date for the product. Stock arrival date for the product. By default, this property is not displayed on the storefront (though it is available to be added to custom widgets you create), and does not control whether a product can be purchased. Shoppers can purchase an active product with active SKUs in stock, regardless of the Arrival Date, even if that date is in the future.
Height, Length, Width, and Weight	Specifies the physical dimensions of a product.
Order Limit	The maximum number of this product that can be purchased per order.

The following table describes the default SKU properties for the base product type.

Property	Description
Name	Short, descriptive name that identifies the SKU. By default, the SKU inherits the name of its parent product.
SKU ID	The ID that identifies the SKU internally. Each SKU ID must be unique within a product.
Active	Specifies whether the SKU is displayed on your store and in search results when its parent product is active. By default, the Active option is selected.
Discountable	Specifies whether the SKU can be discounted by Commerce promotions. By default, the Discountable option is selected. For more information, see Understand promotion targets.

Edit the Base Product Type

You can add new properties to the base product type and make some changes to its default properties. You cannot remove any of the default type or SKU properties, though you can do the following:

Mark some of them as not required so that merchandisers can ignore them when creating new products. (The product’s Name, ID, and List Price properties are always required, as is the SKU ID property.)
Mark them as Internal-Only so that they cannot appear on the storefront.

To edit product properties in the base product type:

On the Catalog page, click the Manage Catalogs button and select Product Types.
Click Base Product to display its type properties.
To add a new product property, click Add Property and select Standard or Shopper Input.
- Standard specifies properties whose values you provide when creating products.
- Shopper Input specifies properties whose values shoppers provide when purchasing a product on your store. For example, initials for a monogram or a message to accompany gift wrapping.
See Create custom product types for details about how to add a new property.
To edit an existing property, click its Edit button.
You cannot change a default property’s ID. You can make optional properties required, but you cannot make required properties optional.

See Create custom product types for details about property settings.
Click Done when you finish adding and editing properties.

To add or edit SKU properties in the base product type:

On the Catalog page, click the Manage Catalogs button and select Product Types.
Click Base Product to display its type properties.
Click the SKU Properties tab.

Understand Custom Product Types

In addition to inheriting all the product properties from the base product type, custom product types let you provide product, SKU, and variant properties for different kinds of products.

Standard product properties let you add information specific to a particular kind of product. For example, suppose your store carries a large inventory of cameras. You might want to create a custom product type called Camera that includes type properties such as effective pixels and exposure control.
Standard product property values can also be used as search terms and facets on your store. For more information, see Create custom product types.
Shopper input product properties let you capture information from shoppers for a particular kind of product. For example, shoppers can enter initials for a monogram or a message to include in a card with gift wrapping. Shopper input properties can be displayed on the storefront but are not used as search terms and facets.

Shopper input properties can be optional or required. For example, when a shopper selects gift wrapping they can include an optional gift message, but when a shopper selects monogramming, they must supply the letters that will be monogrammed on the main product.

See Support add-on products for an example of incorporating a custom shopper input property into a widget so shoppers can use it on the storefront.
SKU properties let you add information specific to a SKU. For example, you could create custom SKU properties that hold UPC codes or IDs that represent SKUs in an external order management system.
SKU property values can also be used as search terms and facets on your store. For more information, see Create custom product types.
Variant properties represent options you can combine to create SKUs. For example, if a shirt is available in three sizes and two colors, size and color are its variant properties.

Variant property values can also drive image display on your store’s product details and category pages. Select one variant property per product that gets images assigned to each of its values. For example, suppose a shirt called Cotton Tee is available in three colors, red, blue, and green. You can assign separate images to each color value. When a shopper navigates to the shirt’s product details page and selects the color green, the main image changes to the green shirt.

You can also display style-based products on category pages. That is, images for each value of the selected variant appear as separate products on your store. Continuing with the shirt example, suppose the shirt is part of the Tops & Tees category. When a shopper navigates to Tops & Tees, the shirt appears three times on the page, once in each of the available colors.

For more information, see Create custom product types.

Create Custom Product Types

To create a custom product type:

On the Catalog page, click the Manage Catalogs button and select Product Types.
Click New Custom Type.
Enter a name for the new product type and click Save.
You can now add product, SKU, and variant properties to the new product type.

To add standard product properties to a custom product type:

On the product type’s Product Properties tab, click Add Property and select Standard.
Select a property type and enter values to define it.
The property type you select controls the type of editor merchandisers see when they create products using this new type. For more information, see Property types.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each new standard product property you want to add to the product type. When you are finished, click Done.

To add shopper input properties to a custom product type:

On the product type’s Product Properties tab, click Add Property and select Shopper Input.
Select a property type and enter
The property type you select controls the type of editor shoppers see on your store. . For more information, see Property types.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each new standard product property you want to add to the product type. When you are finished, click Done.

To add SKU properties to a custom product type:

On the product type’s SKU Properties tab, click Add Property.
Select a property type and enter values to define it.
The property type you select controls the type of editor merchandisers see when they create products using this new type. For more information, see Property types.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each new SKU property you want to add to the product type. When you are finished, click Done.

To add variant properties to a custom product type:

On the product type’s Variant Properties tab, click Add Property.
Enter a name, ID, and values for the property. Press the ENTER key after you type each property value.
For example, to add color variants to a property type, you could enter the following:

Name: Color

ID: color

Values: Poppy, Navy, Charcoal, White

Tip: You can drag values to reorder them. The order values appear in here is their default order on the product detail page on your store, though you can change the order for individual products. See Sort variant values on the product details page for more information.
Click Save.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each new variant property you want to add. When you are finished, click Done.

You can configure how images are displayed for property values of one variant per product type. Select a variant whose properties look different in images, such as color.

To configure image display for a variant property’s values:

On the product type’s Variant Properties tab, click Edit for the property you want to use.
Under display properties, select Allow product images at variant property value level.
This allows you to assign a different image to each of the variant’s values.
If you also want to display images for each value separately on collections pages, select Display product entries in product listing by these property values.
Important: Once you save these options, you cannot change them.
Click Save.

See Add images to products for information about how to assign images to the values on a product-by-product basis.

Delete Custom Product Types

You can delete custom product types with the Admin API. You cannot delete the base product type. You cannot delete a product type that is being used by products in your catalog. For details about the Retail Digital Commerce REST API endpoints, see the REST API for Oracle Retail Digital Commerce Guide.

Delete a custom product type by specifying its ID. Send a GET request to the/ccadmin/v1/productTypes endpoint to get a list of all custom product types in your Commerce instance. For example:

The following is a sample response for a productTypes request:

{
    "items":[
        {
            "displayName":"test  product type",
            "id":"testproducttype"
        },
        {
            "displayName":"New Product Type",
            "id":"NewProductType"
        }
    ]
}

Once you have the ID of the custom product type you want to delete, send a DELETE request to the/ccadmin/v1/productTypes/{id} endpoint to deleted the specified product type. The following sample request body removes the custom product type NewProductType a Commerce instance:

{"id":"NewPropertyType"}

Property Types

The following table describes the properties you can add to a product type or SKU type.

Property type	Allows the merchandiser to enter
Short text	A single line of unformatted text.
Text area	One or more paragraphs of unformatted text. This is also known as a long text property. For details about this property type, see Add long text properties to products and SKUs.
Rich text	One or more paragraphs of formatted text. Note: A rich text property can have a default value of no more than 255 characters. However, if you import or manually enter the value, it can have multiple paragraphs, each with more than 255 characters.
Number	A numeric value.
Check box	A single true/false property.
Date	A date and time property with a calendar picker.
Selection list	A list property that allows a single selection from a specified set of values.

The following table describes the settings for each standard product or SKU property:

Setting	Description
Label (required)	The label that appears above the property editor in the product dialog.
Property ID (required)	The ID that identifies the property internally. Each property ID must be unique within your catalog, although the administration interface does not always prevent you from creating multiple properties with the same ID. If a property in the base product type and a custom property in a custom product type have the same property ID, the value of the property in the base product type always overwrites the value of the property in the custom product type.
Default Value	A value that is pre-populated in the property editor. Properties that are required must have default values.
Values	For a Selection List property, the set of strings to display in the list. You must add at least one string. Press Enter after you finish typing each string to add it to the Values field.
Required	Specifies whether a property must be set before a merchandiser can save a product. By default, properties are not required.
Translatable	Specifies whether a short-text or rich-text property can be translated. By default, properties are not translatable. If you select this option, you cannot change it later.
Display Properties	Select Visible in Storefront if you want to be able to display the property on your store. This is the default setting for all properties. Select Internal Only if you do not want the property to appear on your storefront. Note that shopper input properties cannot be Internal Only.
Allow property to be searched	Allows shoppers to search on values entered for properties. This setting is available for short text and number properties. You must also add the property to the searchable field ranking to make it searchable. See Add fields to the searchable field ranking list.
Allow property to be search facet	Allows shoppers to use the property as a refinement when filtering search results. This setting is available for short text and number properties.
Allow property to be a multi-select search facet	Allows shoppers to use the property as a refinement when making multiple selections to filter search results. For example, shoppers could filter results by selecting several brands. This setting is available for short text and number properties.

The following table describes the settings for each shopper input product property:

Setting	Description
Label (required)	The label that appears above the property editor on your store’s pages.
Property ID (required)	The ID that identifies the property internally. Each property ID must be unique within a product type.
Shopper Input Prompt	Helper text that appears with the property editor on your store’s pages.
Default Value	A value that is pre-populated in the property editor. Properties that are required must have default values.
Values	For a Selection List property, the set of strings to display in the list. You must add at least one string. Press Enter after you finish typing each string to add it to the Values field.
Required for Shopper	Specifies whether a property must be set before a shopper can complete the purchase. By default, properties are not required.

Add Long Text Properties to Products and SKUs

Long text properties (called Text Area in the administration interface Property Types dialog) let you store a large amount of plain unformatted text, such as content in CSV, JSON, or new-line-separated list formats.

No long text properties are available by default, but you can create and add long text properties to any Retail Digital Commerce product type or SKU type, using either the administration interface or the Admin API.

To create a long text property in the administration interface, follow the instructions in Create custom product types. To create a long text property with the Admin API, use the createProductTypeSpecification endpoint for product types and the createSkuProperty endpoint for SKU types. See Learn about the APIs for information about accessing the REST API documentation.

Create and Work with Products

A product is a navigational end-point in your catalog, for example, a camera or a pair of shoes.

Once you have defined product types as described in Create and edit product types, you can use those types to create or import new products. This section describes how to work with products on the Retail Digital Commerce Catalog page. To learn how to import products into your catalog, see Import and Export Catalog Items and Inventory.

This section includes the following topics:

Create Products

If a collection is selected when you create a product, the new product is automatically created in that collection. Otherwise, it is created in Unassigned Products. If the collection where you create a product is linked to other parents, the product will appear in all locations the collection is linked to. You cannot create products in the Storefront Navigation or Non-Navigable root collections. See Organize Products in Collections for more information.

This section describes how to create a new product. See Link and unlink collections and products to learn how to link an existing product to a collection.

To create a new product:

On the Catalog page, click the New Product button and select New from the menu that appears.
Select a product type and click Select.
Enter values for the product’s properties.

The properties you see depend on the product type you selected.

See Understand the base product type for information about the default properties available to all products.
Click Create.

Now you can create SKUs by combining the properties you entered. See Create and work with SKUs for more information. You can also add images. See Add images to products for more information.

Activate and Deactivate Products

By default, a newly-created product is not active, which means that none of the product’s SKUs are displayed on your store. You might want to deactivate a product if inventory is low or if the product will soon be discontinued.

Deactivating a product prevents it from appearing on your store or in search results but does not remove it from your environment. (See Delete products for information about permanently removing a product.) If you deactivate a product that is linked to more than one parent, Commerce deactivates it in all locations.

To deactivate a product:

On the Catalog page, open the product you want to deactivate.
On the General tab of the product details page, uncheck the Active setting and click Save.

Delete Products

Deleting a product permanently removes the product and all its associated SKUs from Retail Digital Commerce. All price lists that included prices for the product’s SKUs are automatically updated. If you delete a product that is linked to more than one parent, Retail Digital Commerce deletes it in all locations.

Once you delete a product, you cannot retrieve it. Deleting a product might also affect orders and reports that include the product’s SKUs. An alternative to deleting a product is marking it as inactive so that it is no longer displayed. See Activate and deactivate products for more information.

Important: Deleting assets, such as products, catalogs, shipping methods, and so on, can result in discrepancies in your system, which may produce errors. It is recommended that you disable assets instead of deleting.

To delete a product:

On the Catalog page, select the product whose SKUs you want to delete.
On the General tab, select SKUs and click Delete Selected SKUs.
Confirm that you want to delete the SKUs.

Create Add-On Products

Add-on products let shoppers customize or enhance their purchases with optional extras such as monogramming, gift wrap, or warranties.

You link an add-on product to a main product so shoppers see it on the main product’s details page and can optionally purchase it along with the main product.

For Open Storefront Framework (OSF), you can use the default OSF widgets that let you display add-on products in the Product, Cart, Checkout, Order History, Order Details, and Return Details pages. These widgets are described at the end of this topic.

Keep the following points in mind when working with add-on products:

An add-on product is available for all the main product’s SKUs. You cannot link an add-on product only to specific SKUs. For example, if monogramming is available for a tote bag, you cannot specify that monogramming is available only for canvas SKUs but not leather SKUs.
For an add-on product with multiple SKUs, you do not have to link all the SKUs to a main product. For example, suppose an add-on product for warranties includes SKUs for 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year protection. It may not be appropriate to offer a 2-year or 3-year warranty on inexpensive items, so you can choose to offer only the 1-year warranty on those items.
Any SKUs added to an add-on product after it was added to the main product are not automatically selected as add-ons. To add the new SKUs remove the product as an add-on and then add it again.
Add-on products can be products that you let shoppers buy separately, for example, USB cables or chargers could be sold separately and could also be sold as add-on products for phones. It does not make sense for certain types of add-ons, such as monograms and gift wrapping, to be sold on their own, but for add-on products that can be purchased separately, the price is the same, whether the product is purchased on its own or as an add-on to another product.
Volume pricing is not supported for add-on products.
When a product is discounted by a promotion, add-on products linked to are also discounted. See Understand how add-on products affect promotions for more information.

Follow these steps to create an add-on product:

Create a product type for the add-on product. This lets you add product, SKU, and variant properties specific to each type of add-on product, such as color, style, and text for a monogram, or length of coverage for a warranty. See Create and edit product types for more information.
Create the add-on product from the product type you created in the previous step. See Create and work with products for more information.
Create one or more SKUs for the new product. See Create SKUs for more information.
Continuing with the monogram example, create a SKU for each combination of monogram colors and styles you want to offer.
Add inventory for each SKU. See Manage inventory for more information.

Follow these steps to link an add-on product to a main product:

On the Catalog page, select the main product to which you want to link add-on products.
On the Add Ons tab, click the Include Add Ons button.
Select one or more products from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting all or part of a product name or ID in the Add Ons box.
Click Add Selected.
Click Done when you finish adding products.
By default, Retail Digital Commerce includes all an add-on product’s SKUs, but you can remove any that are not appropriate for the main product.
Click an add-on product to display its SKUs, then click the X icon next to a SKU to remove it. If you remove all a product’s SKUs, Retail Digital Commerce automatically removes the add-on product.
Click Save.

Import and Export add-on Products

You can use the import feature to create add-on products and link them to other products in your catalog. See Import and Export Catalog Items and Inventory for details about how to import and export data in Retail Digital Commerce.

The easiest way to format a file for importing catalogs is to start by exporting a file that you can use as a template for items you want to add or modify. See Export catalog items for more information about how to export data.

When you look at the exported spreadsheet, you can see that the second row displays column headings that contain the internal names of the exported properties. The addOnProduct column includes product IDs for the add-on products and the addOnSku column includes SKU IDs for each SKU available for the products in the corresponding addOnProduct cell.

Product data begins in the third row and continues for the remainder of the spreadsheet. If an item does not have a value for a property, the corresponding cell is blank. When an add-on product has multiple SKUs, its addOnProduct cell contains multiple entries for each product, one for each of the SKUs and its addOnSku column contains multiple entries, one for each available SKU. Multiple entries are separated with a| (vertical bar.

For example, suppose a product has optional monogramming. There are three monogramming SKUs, one for each of three colors. The addOnProduct cell in the spreadsheet might look like this:

item1:Product_19Mg|item2:Product_19Mg|item3:Product_19Mg

The addOnSku cell in the spreadsheet might look like this:

item1:Sku_19red|item2:Sku_19blu|item3:Sku_19grn

Display add-on Products in Open Storefront Framework (OSF)

OSF includes default widgets that let you display add-on products on your storefront.

The product-details container widget, on the Product layout, includes a product-add-on-items widget. This widget renders a checkbox with the add-on item name. It includes a child component, add-on-item-details, that renders the additional details of each add-on item.

The add-on-item-details component has two child components:

add-on-item-shopper-input displays fields for shopper input, such as the message to include with a gift or the initials to use for a monogram. For details about shopper-input properties, see Create and edit product types.
add-on-item-variant displays the list of SKUs, a shopper can select from, such as combinations of monogram colors and styles. Each SKU is displayed with a radio button so shoppers can select it.

When the shopper selects add-on items and clicks the product-add-to-cart button, the selected add-on items are added to the cart along with the main product. The cart-add-on-items widget renders the add-on items, along with details like SKUs and shopper-input values, on the Cart, Checkout, Order Confirmation, Order History, Order Details, and Return Details pages. On the Cart, Extended Cart, and Checkout Shipping pages, a checkbox is displayed (and checked by default) for each add-on item. If the shopper unchecks a checkbox, the associated add-on item and its details are removed and the cart is repriced. (On the Checkout Review, Order History, Order Details, and Return Details pages, the checkbox is hidden and only add-on item details are displayed.)

Organize Products in Collections

Collections organize your catalog into a hierarchy that provides a navigational framework for your store.

Collections can contain both products and other collections.

Note:

Retail Digital Commerce also supports directly linking products to independent catalogs without adding those products to collections.

Understand Collections

Collections organize your catalog into a hierarchy that provides a navigational framework for your store. Collections can contain both products and other collections.

Each Retail Digital Commerce catalog includes two root collections. These collections cannot be deleted or made children of any other collections. These are the only two root collections a catalog can contain; you cannot create other root collections.

Storefront Navigation is the starting point in the navigational structure of the catalog. It contains all the catalog’s collections, products, and SKUs.
Non-Navigable contains products and collections, such as gift wrapping or monogramming, that shoppers can buy but not browse to as part of the hierarchical catalog on your store.

Collections, except root collections, can belong to multiple catalogs. See Link and unlink collections and products for more information.

To create new products in a collection, see Create products. To link existing products to a collection, see Link and unlink collections and products.

Understand Unassigned Products and Unassigned Collections

Products and collections that are not assigned to any parent in any catalog hierarchy appear in these lists above the collection hierarchy on the Catalog page. Products that are not part of any collection appear in the Unassigned Products list. Collections that have no parent collection appear in the Unassigned Collections list.

Unassigned products do not appear in the navigation for your store and are not returned in any search results. Unassigned collections are not returned in search results.

A product or collection becomes unassigned when one of the following things happens:

It has been removed from all other collections.
It has been unlinked from all parents.
It is imported into Commerce with no parent collection.
You specifically created a product in Unassigned Products.

You can view and work with unassigned products and collections just as you do any others in your catalog hierarchy. You cannot create new collections or drag existing collections in the Unassigned Collections lists. You can link a product or collection to a collection in the Unassigned Collections list. You can create new product in the Unassigned Products list but you cannot link an existing product there.

There are several ways to move an item out of the Unassigned Products or Unassigned Collections lists:

Drag both products and collections to a parent in the catalog hierarchy.
Move both products and collections to a parent in the catalog hierarchy. See
Link collections to a parent in the catalog hierarchy. See Link and unlink collections and products for more information.

Create Collections

You can create a collection that is a child of either of the two root collections, Storefront Navigation or Non-Navigable. You cannot create a new collection at the root level of a catalog.

This section describes how to create a new collection. To link an existing collection, see Link and unlink collections and products.

To create a new collection:

On the Catalog page, click the New Collection button and select New from the list that appears.
Fill in the property fields in the New Collection screen.
Click Save.

The following table describes the properties Retail Digital Commerce provides for collections. You can also use the REST APIs to create custom properties for collections. See Create custom properties for collections for more information.

Property	Description
Name (required)	Short, descriptive name that identifies the collection. Collection names do not have to be unique.
Collection ID (required)	The ID that identifies the collection internally. Each collection ID must be unique within your catalog.
Description	A short description to display with the collection.
Long Description	Detailed descriptive text to display with the collection. The long description is created with an HTML editor called CKEditor that you can use to edit and apply rich-text formatting.
Exclude from XML Sitemap	Excludes selected collections from the collections sitemap. The XML sitemap is an index of page URLs on your site that is available for crawling by search engines. It helps search engines to crawl your site more intelligently.
Selected Parents	All the collection’s parent collections. By default, when you create a new collection, it has a single parent, Storefront Navigation. To change a collection’s parents, click the Edit button and select collections from the list. See Link and unlink collections and products for more information. To make the collection a child of another collection, select a collection in the Change Parent list. If you remove all a collection’s parents, Retail Digital Commerce moves it to the Unassigned Collections list.
Status	Specifies whether the collection is displayed on your store. Active: The collection is displayed on your store. Inactive: The collection is not displayed on your store. This is the default setting for new root collections. Inherited from parent: The collection’s status is the same as its parent. This is the default setting for new child collections.

Reorder Products in Collections

Each product has a specific position in the collection. The page coding in the Retail Digital Commerce layouts and widgets uses the position to control the order in which products appear on the collection pages.

If you reorder products in a collection that is linked to other collections or catalogs, the collection’s product order is the same in all places the collection appears.

To reorder products in a collection:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection that contains products you want to rearrange.
You can drag a product to a new position in either Grid View or List View.
To use numbers to move a product to a new position in the collection, click the List View button at the top of the page, then change the product's number.
Enter a number from 1 to the number of products in the collection. If the number you enter is greater than the number of products, rearranging moves the product to the end of the list.
To move a product to the top of a collection, click the arrow icon at the right-hand side of the product’s tile.

Move Collections

You can reorder collections by dragging them to new positions in an independent catalog’s collections list: If a collection is linked to multiple parents, the new order is the same in all catalogs. You cannot move a collection to the root position in a catalog. You cannot move a parent collection to one of its children.

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection you want to move.
Perform one of the following tasks:
- Drag the collection to a new position in the hierarchy and drop it. A vertical line appears at a potential drop location when you hover over it.
- Right-click the collection and click Edit. Click the Edit button next to the Selected Parents field and select a new parent for the collection.

Find Products in Collections

To learn how to perform custom, rule-based searches for products in collections and catalogs, see Find products in catalogs.

Sort Products in Collections

To display a collection of products, click the corresponding link in the left column of the Catalog page, and then choose a sort option from the Display Order list. The list includes options for sorting by name, ID, or price, in ascending or descending order.

Note that the Display Order list is disabled for search results.

Delete Collections

Deleting a collection that has more than one parent removes it from all parent collections. You can delete only empty collections. If you want to delete a collection that contains products or other collections, remove them first.

To delete a collection:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection you want to delete.
Click the edit link.
In the collection’s details dialog, click Delete.
Confirm that you want to delete the collection.

Remove Products from Collections

Removing products from a collection does not remove them from the catalog. If a product has more than one parent collection, removing it from one collection does not automatically remove it from others. If you remove a product from its only parent collection, it is automatically moved to the Unassigned Products list.

You can also remove a product from a collection on the product’s details page. See Link and unlink collections and products for more information.

To remove products from a collection:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection where you want to remove products.
Hover over the product to remove until the remove icon appears.
Tip: To remove multiple products, select all the products you want to remove and then click the remove icon on any of them.
Click the remove icon.

Add Images to Collections

Use a collection’s Media tab to upload and arrange collection images that will appear on your store, for example, a hero image that appears on a category landing page. You can upload JPG, PNG, and GIF files. Retail Digital Commerce automatically sizes your images for display on different devices, such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.

Note:

This section describes how to upload images to individual collections. See Manage Media for your Store for information about using the media library, including information about uploading a ZIP file of images and other types of media that are automatically assigned to products and collections in your catalog.

Once you assign images to a collection, you can tag them to specify how they are displayed on your store via the Category Content widget. For example, an image tagged with Hero is displayed as the hero image on the category landing page. For more information about the Category Content widget, see Design Your Store Layout.

To add an image to a collection:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product to which you want to add images.
On the product’s Media tab, click Add Images and select Add New.
Select an image to upload.
You can upload only one image at a time. If you select a file with the same name as a file you already uploaded, the new file replaces the existing one.
Click Save.

To assign an image to a product from the media library:

On the Catalog page, open the product to which you want to add images.
On the product’s Media tab, click Add Images and select Media Library.
Select images to assign to the product and click Add.
For details about selecting, sorting, and searching for images in the media library, see Manage Media for your Store.
Click Save.

To tag an image for display in the Category Content widget:

On the Catalog page, open the collection whose images you want to tag.
On the collection’s Media tab, hover over the image and click the Tag icon.
Click the Tags field and select a tag value to assign to the image.
You can select Hero, Large, Medium, Small, or Thumbnail.

You can assign the same tag to more than one image. For example, if you assign the Hero tag to several images for the same collection, the images are displayed in a carousel on the category landing page.
Click the check mark icon to save your tags.
Click Save.

Configure Catalogs with Optional Collections

You can link products directly to an independent catalog without adding them to any collections.

By default, you add products to collections to organize your catalog into a hierarchy and provides a navigational framework for your store. You can also link products directly to a catalog, without adding them to any collections. Linking new products directly to a catalog can speed up catalog deployment, especially for large catalogs.

Understand Catalogs with Optional Collections

You can link products directly to independent catalogs; you cannot link products directly to a filtered view of an independent catalog. (Catalogs with directly-linked products do support filtered views, however.)

You can create catalogs with all products directly linked, or you can create catalogs that include a mix of directly-linked products and products in collections. You can also add directly-linked products to collections, except in the default Product catalog that ships with Retail Digital Commerce; product linked directly to that catalog cannot be in any of its collections.

Note:

If your environment uses a default collection for products, a product directly linked to the catalog will also be added to the default collection for products. See Create default parent collections for more information about setting a default collection for products.

On your storefront, shoppers can find directly-linked products by searching. Keep in mind, though, that by default, collections control catalog hierarchy and navigation. Therefore, shoppers cannot browse to products that are only directly-linked to a catalog unless you have created a custom menu/taxonomy structure with custom links. Storefronts that are driven entirely by search require this type of customization, for example.

Understand the Difference Between Optional Collections and Filtered Views

A filtered catalog provides a filtered view of an existing independent catalog. Catalogs with directly-linked products do support filtered views, and while both features can speed up catalog creation and deployment, they address different merchant concerns.

Filtered views let merchants scale to a larger number of catalogs with less work and provide flexibility for merchants who sell to a number of accounts or in a number of countries. Filtered catalogs provide central management of collections and taxonomies and give merchants fine-grained control over the availability of products for each account or country while maintaining a single collection structure across catalogs.
Directly linking products to catalogs lets merchants who have very large catalogs deploy more quickly because they do not have to manage collections and assign products to them. Directly linking products to catalogs is especially useful for merchants who want a purely search/facet driven storefront or those who manage their taxonomies externally and do not want to replicate this effort in Retail Digital Commerce.
Filtered views and direct linking of products can be used together and can be especially useful for merchants who need to scale to a larger number of catalogs but who also manage taxonomies externally.

For more information about creating filtered views, see Work with filtered catalogs.

Find Products Directly Linked to Catalogs in the Administration Interface

You can quickly find products that are linked directly to catalogs by performing a rule-based search on the Catalog page in the administration interface.

To create the search rule, follow these steps:

On the Catalog page, click Search Products and then click the Custom Search icon next to the search text box.
Select a product type to use from the Product Types list, then click the Create Rule button. You can select only one product type per rule.
Select Directly Linked Catalogs from the drop-down list in the rule. You can select only one property per rule.
Select an operator that links the property to a value that you will specify in the next step. You can select contains, does not contain, exists, or does not exist.
If you selected the operator contains or does not contain, select a catalog to search. If you selected the operator exists or does not exist, you do not need to select a catalog.
Click Search.

For more information about searching for products, see Find products in catalogs.

Link Products Directly to a Catalog

This section describes how to link a product directly to a catalog in the administration interface. To learn how to link products to a catalog by importing them, see Import catalog items and inventory. To learn how to link products to a catalog with the REST API, see information about the /ccadmin/v1/products endpoints using the directCatalogs parameter in the REST API for Oracle Retail Digital Commerce documentation on Oracle Help Center.

To link an existing product to a catalog:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product you want to link. See Find products in catalogs for more information.
On the product’s Membership tab, click the Edit List button under Directly Linked Catalogs.
Display available catalogs by typing or pasting some text in the search box.
The filter control matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the name or ID, not just at the beginning. Usually, as you type more characters, there are fewer matches. When you see the item you want, select it.
Select one or more catalogs and click Add Selected.
(Optional) to unlink the product from a catalog, remove a catalog from the Selections list.
- To remove a single catalog, click the x at the end of a catalog's name.
- To remove all catalogs from the list, click the Clear List button.
Click Done when you finish adding catalogs.

Import and Export Products Directly Linked to Catalogs

You can use the Import and Export features on the administration interface Catalog page to import and export products that are directly linked to catalogs. See Import and Export Catalog Items and Inventory for details about how to perform bulk import and export of products in Retail Digital Commerce.

The easiest way to format a file for importing related products for products is to start by exporting a file that you can use as a template for the items you want to add or modify. See Export catalog items for more information about how to export products.

When you look at the exported spreadsheet, you can see that the second row displays column headings that contain the internal names of the exported properties. The directCatalogs column includes catalog IDs for the catalogs that products are directly linked to.

Product data begins in the third row and continues for the remainder of the spreadsheet. If an item does not have a value for a property, the corresponding cell is blank. If the first row of the spreadsheet includes a catalog context in the sixth column (F1), for example, CATALOG=movieCat, the directCatalogs column can contain only the catalog ID specified in the in the header, otherwise, the data will not import successfully. If the spreadsheet does not include a catalog context, the directCatalogs column can contain any valid catalog ID from your Retail Digital Commerce instance. To directly assign a product to multiple catalogs, separate each ID with a comma.

See Import catalog items and inventory for more information about how to import your changes back into the catalog.

Link and Unlink Collections and Products

Linking a collection or product associates it with a parent.

Linking is useful when you want a product to appear in multiple collections or a collection to appear in multiple catalogs. Linked items have multiple parents, one parent for each location. When you make a change to the item in one location, that change is reflected in all locations.

For example, suppose your catalog contains a product called Gas Hibachi in the Outdoors collection and you want it to also appear in a seasonal Father’s Day Gifts collection. You can simply link it to that collection.

You can link both products and collections to multiple parent collections. To link a collection to another catalog, add it to the catalog’s Included Collections list. (See Understand catalogs for more information.)

This section includes the following topics:

Link and Unlink Products

You can link a product to one or more collections. Products appear in more than one catalog when they are linked to collections that are part of different catalogs.

If you unlink a product from all its parent collections, Retail Digital Commerce moves it to the Unassigned Products list.

To access all products in your environment, regardless of their parent collections or catalogs, click the All Products lists that appears above the collection hierarchy on the administration interface Catalog page. See Find products in collections for more information.

To link an existing product to a collection:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection where you want to link products.
Click the New Product button and select Link Existing Products from the menu that appears.
By default, Commerce lets you search for products in all catalogs. To search for products in a specific catalog, click the Catalogs button and select a catalog.
Select one or more products from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting some text in the Products box.
The filter control matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the name or ID, not just at the beginning. Usually, as you type more characters, there are fewer matches. When you see the item you want, select it.
Click Add Selected.
Click Done when you finish adding products.

To link products to multiple parent collections at the same time

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product you want to work with and open it.
On the product’s Membership tab, click the Edit button.
By default, Retail Digital Commerce lets you search for collections in all catalogs. To search for products in a specific catalog, click the Catalogs button and select a catalog.
Select a collection from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting some text in the Collections box.
The filter control matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the name or ID, not just at the beginning. Usually, as you type more characters, there are fewer matches. When you see the item you want, select it.
Click Add Selected.
(Optional) to unlink the product from a collection, remove a collection from the Included Collections list.
- To remove a single collection, click the x at the end of a collection’s name.
- To remove all collections from the list, click the Remove All button.
Click Done when you finish adding collections.

Link and Unlink Collections

You can link a collection to one or more parent collections. If you unlink a collection from all its parent collections, Retail Digital Commerce moves it to the Unassigned Collections list. See Work with independent catalogs to learn how to link collections to catalogs.

To link a collection to a parent:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection you want to be the parent.
Right-click the collection in the tree and click Link Existing Collection.
By default, Retail Digital Commerce lets you search for collections in all catalogs. To search for products in a specific catalog, click the Catalogs button and select a catalog.
Select a collection from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting some text in the Products or Collections box.
The filter control matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the name or ID, not just at the beginning. Usually, as you type more characters, there are fewer matches. When you see the item you want, select it.
(Optional) By default, the collection you right-clicked is automatically selected as the parent collection, but you can change it by selecting a new collection from the Select Parent Collection list.
Click Link.

To unlink a collection from a parent:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the collection you want to unlink.
Right-click the collection in the tree and click Unlink From Parent.
If you unlink a collection from its last parent, Retail Digital Commerce moves it to the Unassigned Collections list.

Create Default Parent Collections

A collection or product can be the child of more than one collection, in more than one catalog. Its default parent is the collection that determines its hierarchy in a catalog.

Linking products and collections to multiple catalogs provides a more flexible catalog strategy, but can complicate navigation. This is especially true if a shopper accesses a collection or product through a search engine rather than by traversing the catalog hierarchy.

A product or collection's parentCategory and parentCategoryScope properties allow you to specify a default parent collection for each catalog where a product or collection is linked. The value of parentCategory must be the categoryId of a collection that is one of the item's existing parents.

The scope of the parent setting, that is, where it should be applied, is specified by its parentCategoryScope property. You set both properties when you create or update a collection with the createCollection and updateCollection endpoints, or when you create or update a product with the createProduct and updateProduct endpoints.

The parentCategoryScope property can have one of the following values:

base specifies that the parentCategory collection is the default parent in all catalogs where it is included. Use this scope when you want to specify the default parent collection that should apply wherever the collection or product is shared, unless it is overridden for a specific catalog.
catalogSpecific specifies that the parentCategory collection is the default parent only for the catalog specified by catalogId. Use this scope for a product that should be available only in a specific catalog, for example, a product that can be sold only in a certain country. Setting a catalogSpecific value does not change the existing base value. If no base value is set, Retail Digital Commerce automatically sets the base value as the same value you set for catalogSpecific.
global specifies the default parent category for a product or collection and applies it in every catalog where the item appears. The global scope resets the base scope value and removes all catalog context from the collection or product's default parent.
revertToBase removes the catalogSpecifc scope for the catalog in context for the product or collection and sets its default parent back to the base scope.

If no scope is specified in a PUT or POST request, and a catalog-specific value exists, the request uses that value. Otherwise, the request uses the base value.

Set a Default Parent for a Collection

This section contains Admin API examples that show how to set a default parent for a collection. To update a collection, issue a PUT request to the /ccadmin/v1/collections/{id} endpoint. To create a collection, issue a POST request to the /ccadmin/v1/collections/{id} endpoint.

The examples in this section are based on the following scenario:

A Retail Digital Commerce instance includes two sites, one for US shoppers and one for UK shoppers. Each site has its own catalog, usCatalog and ukCatalog, respectively. The BigBrand collection is linked to the following locations in both catalogs:

UK-Catalog / StorefrontNav / New / BigBrand
UK-Catalog / StorefrontNav / Brands / BigBrand
US-Catalog / StorefrontNav / New / BigBrand
US-Catalog / StorefrontNav / Tableware / Brands / BigBrand

The following example updates the default parent collection for BigBrand to Brands. This change affects both catalogs, since the Brands collection exists in both.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/collections/bigBrand

  {
    "properties":{
      "parentCategoryScope": "base",
      "parentCategory" : "Brands"
      }
  }

The following example updates the default parent collection for BigBrand to New in the US Catalog only. It does not affect BigBrand's default parent collection in the UK Catalog.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/collections/bigBrand

{
  "properties":{
    "catalogId": "usCatalog",
    "parentCategoryScope": "catalogSpecific",
    "parentCategory" : "New"
    }
}

The following example updates the default parent collection for BigBrand to Brands. This change affects both the US and UK catalogs, even if a catalog-specific default parent was previously set, as in the previous example.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/collections/bigBrand

{
  "properties":{
    "parentCategoryScope": "global",
    "parentCategory" : "Brands"
   }
}

The following example updates the default parent collection for BigBrand to New in the UK Catalog only. It does not affect BigBrand's default parent collection in the US Catalog.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/collections/bigBrand

{
  "properties":{
    "catalogId": "ukCatalog",
    "parentCategoryScope": "catalogSpecific",
    "parentCategory" : "New"
    }
}

The following example clears the catalog-specific parent setting from the previous example. The default parent collection for BigBrand in the UK Catalog is now set to Brands, which was set as the base value in the first example in this section. Note that the request includes a catalog context ("catalogId": "ukCatalog"). A catalog context is required to set the parentCategoryBase torevertToBase.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/collections/bigBrand

{
  "properties":{
    "catalogId": "ukCatalog",
    "parentCategoryScope": "revertToBase"
    }
}

Set a Default Parent for a Product

This section contains Admin API examples that show how to set a default parent for a product with the /ccadmin/v1/products endpoints. To update a product, issue a PUT request to the /ccadmin/v1/products/{id} endpoint. To create a product, issue a POST request to the /ccadmin/v1/products/{id} endpoint.

The code examples in this section are based on the following scenario:

A Retail Digital Commerce instance includes two sites, one for US shoppers and one for UK shoppers. Each site has its own catalog, usCatalog and ukCatalog, respectively. A serving platter is linked to the following locations in both catalogs:

UK-Catalog / StorefrontNav / New / Large Oval Platter
UK-Catalog / StorefrontNav / Brands / BigBrand / Large Oval Platter
US-Catalog / StorefrontNav / New / Large Oval Platter
US-Catalog / StorefrontNav / Tableware / Large Oval Platter

The following example updates the default parent collection for the Large Oval Platter to New. This change affects both catalogs, since the New collection exists in both.

PUT /ccadmin/v1/products/prod_largeOvalPlatter

  {
    "properties":{
      "parentCategoryScope": "base",
      "parentCategory" : "New"
      }
  }

Create Custom Properties for Collections

Collections include a predefined set of properties that store information about collections you use to organize your catalog.

In addition to these predefined properties, you can create custom collection properties. This section describes how to use the Retail Digital Commerce Admin REST APIs to add custom properties to collections. See the REST API for Oracle Retail Digital Commerce documentation on Oracle Help Center for information you need to know before using the APIs.

Understand Item Types

Item types are templates for Retail Digital Commerce assets, such as collections and promotions. They contain properties that describe the asset.

The category item type lets you work with the collections in a Retail Digital Commerce catalog. You can use the updateItemType endpoint to modify the category item type. You can modify existing properties by changing the values of their attributes and create custom properties by specifying their attributes. See Settable attributes of shopper type properties for descriptions of these attributes. The next section provides an example of creating a custom property for collections.

Create a Custom Collections Property

To add custom properties to the category item type, issue a PUT request to the /ccadmin/v1/itemTypes/category endpoint on the administration server.

Use the following format:

The request header must specify the x-ccasset-language value.
The request body is a map where each key is the ID of a new property, and each value is an object that specifies the values of the attributes of the property.
Each object is also a map, with each key being the name of an attribute and each value being the corresponding attribute value.

Note that the ID of a custom property must include the underscore character (_). This ensures that the ID will not conflict with any properties that Retail Digital Commerce adds to item types in the future. The endpoint returns an error if you attempt to create a custom property without an underscore in its ID.

Remember to publish the new property once it is successfully created. See Publish Changes for more information.

The following example shows a sample request for adding a custom text property to the category item type:

PUT /ccadmin/v1/itemTypes/category HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer <access_token>
x-ccasset-language: en
Content-Type: application/json

{
 "specifications": [
     {
      "id": "_myNewProperty",
      "label": "My New Property",
      "type": "shortText",
      "required": false,
      "uiEditorType": "shortText",
      "uiwritable": "true",
      "localizable": false,
      "hidden": false,
      "propertySortPriority": "100"
    }
     ]}

The response includes the property you created.

...
{
      "hidden": false,
      "length": 254,
      "label": "My New Property",
      "type": "shortText",
      "required": false,
      "searchable": false,
      "writable": true,
      "internalOnly": false,
      "uiEditorType": "shortText",
      "default": null,
      "audienceVisibility": null,
      "localizable": false,
      "textSearchable": false,
      "id": "_myNewProperty",
      "dimension": false,
      "propertySortPriority": "100",
      "editableAttributes": [
        "internalOnly",
        "default",
        "audienceVisibility",
        "hidden",
        "textSearchable",
        "label",
        "dimension",
        "propertySortPriority",
        "required",
        "searchable"
      ]
    }
...

When you add a custom property to the category item type, the property is added to all collections, including any new collections you create and any collections that already exist. It appears on the General tab of every collection's details page in the administration interface. Business users can view, add, and edit values for custom collection properties, just as they do for predefined properties. (See Organize products in collections for more information.) Custom collection properties themselves cannot be edited in the administration interface; you can perform these tasks only with the Admin API.

Access Custom Collections Properties

Storefront and Console developers can access custom properties of the category item type with the following Store API and Agent API endpoints:

getCollection returns a collection by ID.
listCollections returns a list of collections by a list of IDs.
listItemTypes returns information about item types by a list of IDs.
getItemType returns information about an item type by ID.
getPage returns a specific page. For category page responses, custom properties are also returned as part of the response.

Keep the following points in mind when accessing custom properties with Store or Agent endpoints:

If a custom property is specified as internal only (by setting the attribute internalOnly=true when you create the property), it will not be returned by any Store endpoints.
Custom properties appear at the top level of the response.
Only getCollection returns custom properties for child collections. The request must include the parameter expand=childCategories. For example:
```
GET /ccstore/v1/collections/rootCategory?catalogId=storefrontCatalog&maxLevel=1000&expand=childCategories&fields=childCategories%28items%29
```
There is no view model support for custom properties of the category item type.

Add Metadata to Products and Collections

You can enter metadata search information including a title, keywords, and a description for each product and collection in your catalog.

The metadata is then tagged and retrieved as part of a search via a search engine and displayed in the results.

This section describes how to add metadata to products and collections. You can also add alt-text and titles to images assigned to products and collections. See Add alt text and titles to images for more information.

To enter metadata for a product or collection:

On the Catalog page, open the relevant product or collection for which you want to enter metadata search information.
Open the product or collection’s Metadata tab. By default, the following properties are automatically assigned to metadata when a product or collection is created:
- Title Tag: The Name of the product or collection.
- Meta Keywords: The Name and Parent Collection of a product. The Name and Selected Parent of a collection.
- URL Slug: The Name of the product or collection.
- Meta Description: The Name and Description of the product or collection.
To change the current information you must check Edit Manually and enter the text within each box.
To change back to the default alt text, check Edit Manually and click Reset Default.
Enter a Title Tag. This is normally the product or collection title.
Enter Meta Keywords. These are used by search engines to find the most relevant information when processing a search request. Search engines determine the relevance of a search request against these keywords.
Enter a URL Slug. This is a unique, URL-friendly version of the Name of the product or collection. A URL slug can contain only lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (1-9), and a limited number of special characters (- _ % ~). Using a unique URL slug ensures that you do not encounter storefront display issues, such as, 404 errors. See Configure URL patterns for more information
For example, for the product named Button Down Shirt, the URL slug could be button_down_shirt.

See Understand canonical tags for information on signaling the source, or original, URL of a page to search engines.
Enter Meta Description. This description can promote your site to search engine users.
Click Save.

Display Related Products

Use a product’s Related Products tab to select products to display in the Related Products widget on the Product layout and specify the order in which the related products appear.

Use the Details tab to configure how the products look in the widget, for example, whether names and prices are displayed for related products. For more information, see Design Your Store Layout.

This section includes the following topics:

Add and Organize Related Products

To select and organize related products:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product to which you want to add related products.
On the product’s Related Products tab, click Manage Products.
Select products to display.
To select products, begin by typing or pasting some text in the box. The list of products that appears matches letters or numbers that you type, wherever they appear in the asset name or ID, not just at the beginning.

Note:

If you select inactive products, the Related Products widget will not display them. For more information about active and inactive products, see Understand the base product type.
When you finish adding related products, click Display Products.
The Related Products widget will display the products in the order they appear here. You can rearrange them by dragging them to new positions.
Click Save.

Import and Export Related Products

You can use the Retail Digital Commerce import process to import and export a product’s fixed related products. See Import and Export Catalog Items and Inventory for details about how to import and export products in Retail Digital Commerce.

The easiest way to format a file for importing related products for products is to start by exporting a file that you can use as a template for the items you want to add or modify. See Export catalog items for more information about how to export.

When you look at the exported spreadsheet, you can see that the second row displays column headings that contain the internal names of the exported properties. The fixedRelatedProducts column includes product IDs for the products to display in the Related Products widget on the Product layout.

Product data begins in the third row and continues for the remainder of the spreadsheet. If an item does not have a value for a property, the corresponding cell is blank. When you import multiple related products, separate each ID with a comma. The order of the IDs in the spreadsheet controls the order of products displayed on the product details page.

See Import catalog items and inventory for more information about how to import your changes back into the catalog.

Configure AI Recommendations Rules

Retail Digital Commerce lets you create complex recommendation strategies in the administration interface. You can manage these rules across widgets on different page layouts.

Product recommendations are generated by an AI-powered learning engine. Strategies and global exclusions work in harmony with this engine to provide granular control over the merchandising experience.

Recommendation strategies are rules you build to customize the kinds of products that are recommended to shoppers.
Global exclusions are rules you build to prevent certain products from ever being recommended to shoppers.

Understand Recommendations Strategies

Retail Digital Commerce product recommendations are generated by an AI-powered learning engine. The engine analyzes each shopper's behavior in real time to recommend the most relevant products at every interaction.

Retail Digital Commerce provides a number of pre-defined strategies that let you restrict displayed recommendations, for example, to products the shopper has most recently viewed, or products that are most frequently bought by other shoppers who have also viewed a product that a shopper is currently viewing.

In addition to these pre-built strategies, Retail Digital Commerce lets you create your own strategies that provide customized guidance to the recommendations engine. You can use strategies to restrict the kinds of products that are recommended, creating a more curated experience for shoppers and providing the flexibility to tailor your recommendations plan to match your merchandising goals.

Each custom strategy is made up of one or more recommendation groups. A recommendation group is a set of conditions that are evaluated together to specify a group of product recommendations. If a strategy includes multiple recommendation groups, the Product Recommendations widget will display products returned by each recommendation group sequentially, that is, all products returned by the first recommendation group, followed by all products returned by the second recommendation group, and so on.

If a product is returned by multiple recommendation groups in a strategy, it appears only once in the Product Recommendations widget. The product’s display position will be determined by the first recommendation group that returns it.

The following table describes each type of condition you can add to a recommendation group.

Condition type	Description
Brand	The value of the product’s brand property in the context of the current product or products being viewed. If there are multiple products, such as the products in a cart or a wish list, products in any of the brands can be part of the condition.
Browsed Together	Returns recommended products based on the most frequently browsed products by other shoppers associated with the product the shopper is currently viewing.
Collection	The condition returns products based on either the same collection or collections in the context of the current product or products being viewed, or only in collections you specify. If multiple collections are represented, products in any of the collections can be recommended. If there are no collections in context, no restrictions are placed on the recommendations. A product can be in one or more collections. For more information, see Organize products in collections.
Manually Related Products	Returns recommended products based on the products specified as related products for the current product or products being viewed. See Display related products for more information about adding related products to a specific product.
Most Recently Viewed	Returns products the shopper has viewed. Recommended products are displayed starting from the most recently viewed. First-time shoppers on the site are offered no product recommendations.
Price	Lets you select a price range of products to recommend.
Price Type	Lets you select products from specific price list groups to recommend.
Purchased Together	Uses the context of the product the shopper is currently viewing. Recommended products are displayed based on the most frequently purchased products by other shoppers associated with the product the shopper is currently viewing.
Top Sellers	Restricts recommendations to global top sellers. If the recommendation group contains other conditions, Top Sellers will be applied after all other rules. The algorithm for the Top Sellers strategy is based on products purchased. It generally considers the top ten percent of recently-purchased products from the product catalog to offer as recommendations. The strategy does not offer products in a sequential order of most purchased items and has no time restrictions as to when items were purchased. Top Sellers is designed to personalize items recommended to each unique shopper. While a particular product might sell more frequently than other products, that product may not be recommended based on a shopper’s navigation of the site.

Understand Product Context

Product context lets you decide whether a condition for a recommendation group or exclusion rule should be dynamically inferred from the current page. The following procedure explains the steps Retail Digital Commerce goes through to provide context for recommendations conditions when the shopper is viewing pages on your store:

If the current page has a brand or collection, it is used for the context of Brand or Collection.
Otherwise, if the current page has a product, its brand, parent collections, co-browses, and co-buys are used as the context for Brand, Collections, Browsed Together, and Purchased Together conditions.
Otherwise, if there are current wish lists, the products in the wish lists are used to define the context as described in the previous step.
Otherwise, if an order has been placed in the current session, the products in the order are used to define the context as described in step 2. An order is defined as an item that has been purchased during the shopper’s current session. The item could have been placed in the cart during a past session.
Otherwise, if the shopper has added products to their cart but not purchased them (either in this session or their most recent previous session), the products in the cart are used to define the context as described in step 2.
Otherwise, no context is found, so the current condition will not apply.

Understand Recommendations for Account-based Shoppers

Retail Digital Commerce lets you create accounts for companies that do business with you, such as manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. Each account represents a single organization and a unique customer. Shoppers who are associated with an account are called contacts.

The recommendations engine considers the behavior of all contacts who are members of an account when determining which recommendations to show an individual contact. (This also applies to recommendations strategies and exclusions you create.) While recommendations continue to be generated for an individual contact, Retail Digital Commerce also factors in key information about other contacts within the same account. Shared account behavior ensures that buyers now see relevant recommendations based on interaction from all buyers across an account.

For example, suppose buyers within the same account are viewing and purchasing the same products. To enhance the quality of recommendations, Retail Digital Commerce aggregates information about related purchases and customer behavior to optimize the quality and breadth of products that are recommended.

For more information about working with account-based stores and shoppers, see Configure Business Accounts.

Display Recommendations

Once you have created and published custom recommendations strategies, you can customize the Product Recommendations Carousel widget to use specific strategies for different locations on your site. This helps you create more specialized product selections appropriate to each shopper's current context. When you customize the widgets settings on the Design page in the administration interface, you can select any custom strategies you published, along with the out-of-the-box strategies. For more information, see Display product recommendations.

Create Recommendation Strategies

To create a recommendation strategy, follow these steps:

On the Marketing page, click Strategies under AI Recommendations.
Click the New Strategy button.
Enter the name, ID, and optional description for the strategy.

Strategy Display Name: A name for the strategy that will appear in the list of strategies in the administration interface. Each global strategy name must be unique. The name can be up to 50 characters long.

Strategy ID: Retail Digital Commerce automatically creates a unique ID based on the display name you entered. You can change the ID while you are creating the strategy, but you cannot change it once the strategy is saved. An ID can contain only alphanumeric characters or numbers (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and must be unique.

Strategy Description: An optional description of the strategy that helps other users understand it. The description can be up to 1,000 characters long.
Define the strategy by adding recommendation groups. By default, a blank recommendation group is already visible and ready for you to add conditions.
Click the Add Condition button.
Select a value from the Select a condition type list. You can select only one type per condition. For details about each condition type, see the table earlier in this section.
If you selected Brand, Collection, Price, or Price Type, you must select an operator that links the property to a value that you will specify in the next step. The operators you see depend on the condition type you selected.
- For Brand and Collection, you can select is, which matches the rule to the property you will select in the next step or is same as context, which matches the rule to .
- For Price you can select from several numeric operators that match the rule to prices or price ranges. For example, select is less than if you want the condition to return all products priced at less than $50.
- For Price Type you can select is, which matches the rule to a single price group, is one of, which matches the rule to more than one price group, or is same as context, which matches the rule to the shopper’s current price group.
Select or enter a value for the condition property. For Collection and Price Type, Retail Digital Commerce displays a list for you to choose from. For Brand and Price, you must type in a value. The rule editor does not validate any text, numeric, or date values you type.
To add another condition to the recommendation group, click the Add Condition button again and specify the details for the new condition.

If a recommendation group contains more than one condition, it returns products that match all the conditions. Products that match only some of the conditions but not all, are not returned by the recommendation group.
When you are finished adding conditions to the recommendation group, click Save.
To add another recommendation group to the strategy, click Add Recommendation Group.
When you are done adding recommendation groups, click Save to save the strategy.
You must publish strategies in order for them to take effect on your production storefront, though once saved, they are immediately available for preview. See Publish Changes for more information.

Recommendation Strategies Examples

You could use the AI Recommendations rule builder to create the following sample recommendations strategies.

Suppose you want to create a dynamic cross-sell on the Product Detail Page that focuses on brand affinity. You could create a strategy with the following three recommendations groups. Set the maximum number of returned products in each group to four.
- Group 1 includes two conditions: Brand is the same as context and Collection is not same as context.
- Group 2 includes two conditions: Brand is the same as context and Purchased Together.
- Group 3 includes two conditions: Brand is the same as context and Browsed Together.
This strategy recommends up to four products that have the same brand but belong to a different collection, followed by up to four products that are the same brand and frequently purchased together, followed by the remaining products that are browsed together (but not necessarily purchased together).
Suppose you want to recommend an outfit when the shopper is viewing any apparel item. A custom recommendations strategy can dynamically generate an outfit recommendation that automatically promotes products from complementary collections. You could create a strategy with the following four recommendations groups. Set the maximum number of returned products in each group to one.
- Group 1 includes two conditions: Collection is Men’s Tops and Collection is not same as context.
- Group 2 includes two conditions: Collection is Men's Pants and Collection is not same as context, Number of Products = 1.
- Group 3 includes two conditions: Collection is Men’s Shoes and Collection is not same as context.
- Group 4 includes two conditions: Collection is Men’s Belts and Collection is not same as context.
To display these recommendations, create a custom Product Details layout where you define the Product Type as Men’s Apparel and Men’s Footwear and place the Recommendations widget on the layout. Customize the widget to use this custom strategy by selecting it from the Strategy dropdown on the widget’s settings.

Now, when the shopper is on any men’s apparel or footwear product details page, they will see recommendations from the complementary collections.

Create Global Exclusions

Global exclusion rules let you exclude certain products from all recommendations results, ensuring they are never recommended to shoppers. You can exclude products from recommendations based on their brand, parent collections, price range, or price type. Once you publish a global exclusion, it automatically takes affect on your site.

To select products to exclude from recommendations follow these steps:

On the Marketing page, click Global Exclusions under AI Recommendations.
Click the New Global Exclusion button.
Enter the name, ID, and optional description for the rule.

Global Exclusion Display Name: A name for the rule that will appear in the list of global exclusions in the administration interface. Each global exclusion rule name must be unique. The name can be up to 50 characters long.

Global Exclusion ID: Retail Digital Commerce automatically creates a unique ID for the rule based on the display name you entered. You can change the ID while you are creating the rule, but you cannot change it once the rule is saved. An ID can contain only alphanumeric characters or numbers (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and must be unique.

Global Exclusion Description: An optional description of the rule that helps other users understand it. The description can be up to 1,000 characters long.
Define the exclusion rule.

Select a type of property to use from the Select a condition type list. You can select only one type per rule:
- Brand lets you select from all the manufacturer values assigned to products in your catalog. For more information about the Brand property, see Create and edit product types.
- Collection lets you select a collection whose products you want to exclude. You can select a collection from across all catalogs or from a specific catalog.
- Price lets you select a price range of products to exclude.
- Price Type lets you exclude products from specific price list groups.
Select an operator that links the property to a value that you will specify in the next step. The operators you see depend on the condition type you selected.
- For Brand and Collection, you can select is, which matches the rule to the property you will select in the next step or is same as context, which matches the rule to whatever product the shopper is currently viewing, as well as any products in the shopper’s cart or wish lists.
- For Price you can select from several numeric operators that match the rule to prices or price ranges. For example, select is less than if you want to exclude all products priced at less than $50 from recommendations.
- For Price Type you can select is, which matches the rule to a single price group, is one of, which matches the rule to more than one price group, or is same as context, which matches the rule to the shopper’s current price group.
Select or enter a value for the condition property. For Collection and Price Type, Retail Digital Commerce displays a list for you to choose from. For Brand and Price, you must type in a value. The rule editor does not validate any text, numeric, or date values you type.
Click the Create button when you are finished with rule.
You must publish strategies in order for them to take effect on your production storefront, though once saved, they are immediately available for preview. See Publish Changes for more information.

Global Exclusion Examples

You could use the AI Recommendations rule builder to create the following global exclusions.

Never recommend anything from the brand MySample.
In the Global Exclusion Definition, select Brand as the condition, select is as the operator, then MySample in the text box.
Never recommend anything in the Health and Wellness collection.
In the Global Exclusion Definition, select Collection as the condition, select is as the operator, and then select Health and Wellness (including catalog context) from the Collection dropdown list.
Never recommend products that cost less than $25.
In the Global Exclusion Definition, select Price as the condition, select less than as the operator, and then enter 25 in the text box.
Never recommend products that are on sale.
In the Global Exclusion Definition, select Price Type as the condition, select is as the operator, and then select Sale Price from the dropdown list.

Work with the Recommendations API

Use the Recommendations REST API to update visitor tracking state and optionally request recommendations.

The Retail Digital Commerce Recommendations service provides personalized product recommendations to shoppers based on behavior on storefronts. Product recommendations are generated by an AI-powered learning engine trained for a wide variety of ecommerce models with a proven record of increased conversion rate and average order value.

The Recommendations API lets storefront applications feed shopper behavioral information to the engine, and to get back personalized product recommendations which the application can then display to the shopper.

The API exposes a single endpoint, whose payload can perform multiple operations simultaneously. This allows the engine to reduce the number of HTTP transactions between the application and the service, which optimizes latency, providing a better experience for shoppers.

The host of the Recommendations endpoint can be retrieved from the Retail Digital Commerce Store API getExternalServiceData endpoint, using the production-Recommendations resource. The response will include a protocol, host, port, and path to the Recommendations API.

For example, suppose you issue the following request:

GET /ccstore/v1/merchant/production-Recommendations

Retail Digital Commerce returns the a response similar to this sample:

{
"serverType": "production",
"serviceData": {
"protocol": "https",
"host": "recs.occa.<region>.ocs.oraclecloud.com",
"port": 443,
"path": "pr",
"displayName": "Oracle Recommendations",
"name":"Recommendations",
"tenantId":"<tenant ID>"
},
"links": [{
"rel":"self",
"href":"https://example.com/ccstore/v1/merchant/production-Recommendations"
}],
"id":"production-Recommendations"
}

The serviceData object in the response contains the information necessary to construct the URL to the Recommendations API endpoint. This information will rarely change for a given tenant, but it may change on occasion if required by the backing infrastructure. Therefore, it is best to issue a request to the getExternalServiceData endpoint at the start of each user session. Once the Recommendations URL has been constructed, requests to the Recommendations service can be made to the Recommendations endpoint.

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click

The request body is a JSON payload that contains some top level properties for the overall request, and a series of operational properties that update the shopper’s state and request recommendations for the shopper. For details about these properties, see the Retail Digital Commerce REST API documentation that is available on the Oracle Help Center.

In the following sample request, the shopper visits the store’s home page and then clicks a product link. The storefront application should issue two requests to the Recommendations service, one for each page view (the home page and the product details page.)

When the shopper lands on the home page, the client should issue the following request:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "<tenant ID>",
"catalogId": "mysiteCatalog",
"view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com",
"pageTitle": "Mysite Home Page",
"referrer": "https://search.example.com?q=mysite"
}
}

The Recommendations service records that information, and returns a response like the following:

200 OK
{
"token": "aaabbbcccddd"
}

The token in the response contains state information useful to the Recommendations service, and should be provided in the subsequent request. All POST /pr/v4/sessions/click requests will include the token property in the response. The value of the token property is not guaranteed to be the same from request to request. The application must always provide the token from the most recent response. In addition, the token should be persisted between shopper sessions, if possible . This helps maintain recommendations continuity for a shopper across sessions.

Continuing with the previous example, when the shopper clicks the product link on the home page, the application should inform the Recommendations service using the following request:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Red Shirt",
"referrer": "https://mysite.example.com", "productId": "p02113
}
}

Notice the additional property productId in the request. This tells the recommender that the shopper is looking at a product on its details page. This is useful information, and is considered by the Recommendations service the next time the application requests recommendations for this shopper. The recommendations service sends the following response. (In this example, it’s the same value as returned in the previous sample response, but it may change occasionally.)

Retail Digital Commerce lets you create complex recommendation strategies in the administration interface. Suppose you created recommendation strategies that specified recommendations appear on the product detail page. This request can be modified to ask the recommender for recommendations. The modified request would look like this:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD",
"token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Red Shirt",
"referrer": "https://mysite.example.com", "productId": "p02113"
},
"recommendations": { "pdpRecs": {
"numRecs": 6,
"strategy": "inCollection"
}
}
}

That recommendations section will let the service know that you want some product recommendations in the response. With the latest data, the service will generate personalized recommendations for the shopper, with a response like the following:

200 OK
{
"token": "aaabbbcccddd", "recommendations": {
"pdpRecs": {
"recSetId": "342bf3789:32-5",
"recs": [
{ "productId": "p34909" },
{ "productId": "p28200" },
{ "productId": "p11879" },
{ "productId": "p00032" },
{ "productId": "p00877" },
{ "productId": "p21006" }
]
}
}
}

Detailed information about those products (such as the localized display name, product images, and prices for this shopper) can be obtained with API requests to the Retail Digital Commerce Storefront server. You may also choose to have your application cache this information locally.

Multiple recommendation sets can be requested in a single HTTP transaction. For example, if your application has an additional space on the page for recommendations and you want to use a different strategy, an example request payload might look like this:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Red Shirt",
"referrer": "https://mysite.example.com", "productId": "p02113"
},
"recommendations": { "pdpRecs": {
"numRecs": 6,
"strategy": "inCollection"
},
"top": {
"numRecs": 4, "strategy": "topSellers"
}
}
}

The Recommendations service will not recommend the same products in multiple recommendations sets in the same request. This prevents the application from showing the shopper the same product in multiple places on a page.

If a shopper clicks a recommended product, the engine would like to know about it. This is an important piece of feedback, and lets the engine know that the shopper showed interest in a recommended product. Suppose the shopper clicked on the product whose ID is p11879 from the request. The application will show the product details for that product, and should issue a request to the Recommendations service. (The response to this request includes an additional set of recommendations.)

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/comfy-sandals/p11879", "referrer": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Comfy Sandals",
"productId": "p11879"
},
"click": {
"recSetId": "342bf3789:32-5",
"productId": "p11879"
},
"recommendations": {
...
}

}

Your application should notify the Recommendations service if the contents of the shopper’s cart changes, for example, when they add or remove an item. The current cart contents are taken into account when personalized recommendations are made, so it is best to keep the service up to date with a request like the following sample:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/comfy-sandals/p11879", "referrer": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Comfy Sandals",
"productId": "p11879"
},
"cart": {
"productIds": [ "p11879" ], "totalPrice": 48.99, "pricelistGroupId": "sunnysideStore", "currencyCode": "USD"
},
"recommendations": {
...
}
}

This request returns the usual response, with a (possibly changed) token and a fresh set of recommendations, which may be affected by the contents of the cart.

Similarly, if the shopper makes a purchase, this is useful information for the recommendations service. The application should issue a request to the endpoint to indicate that a checkout has occurred.

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "checkout": {
"products": [{ "productId": "p11879", "quantity": 1,
"price": 48.99
},{
"productId": "p02113", "quantity": 1,
"price": 35
}],

"totalPrice":   83.99, "pricelistGroupId": "sunnysideStore", "currencyCode": "USD"
}
}

Retail Digital Commerce responds with the standard response with the token:

200 OK
{
"token": "aaabbbcccddd"
}

If an error occurs due to an invalid input, the response will include the HTTP 400 status code and a short, diagnostic message. These messages are not a part of the API, and they are not intended to be displayed to shoppers. For example:

400 Bad Request
{
"token": "aaabbbcccddd",
"error": "Missing URL in view request."
}

Likewise, if there is an internal service error, the response will include the HTTP 500 status code, and will not return a token. The most recently-returned token should still be used in the next request. For example:

500 Internal Service Error
{
"error": "Something went wrong, ops has been notified."
}

If the shopper’s profile ID is known to the client application, you can pass it in the request as a top level property. This allows for personalized recommendations for the user across different clients, for example, a web browser and a custom headless application. If the user has logged into the client application, each request can include the profile ID, as shown in this example:

POST /pr/v4/sessions/click
{
"tenantId": "p01234567c1PRD", "token": "aaabbbcccddd", "catalogId": "mysiteCatalog", "profileId":  "p271123", "view": {
"url": "https://mysite.example.com/red-shirt/p02113", "pageTitle": "Mysite: Red Shirt",

"referrer": "https://mysite.example.com", "productId": "p02113"
},
"recommendations": { "pdpRecs": {
"numRecs": 6,
"strategy": "inCollection"
},
"top": {
"numRecs": 4, "strategy": "topSellers"
}
}
}

In this sample request, the catalogId property is used when the Retail Digital Commerce instance has multiple catalogs, for example, when the instance supports multiple brand sites or country sites. The Recommendations engine uses catalogId to restrict recommendations to products that are available only in the specified catalog.

Display Product Recommendations

Retail Digital Commerce includes a Product Recommendations widget you can use to provide automated, personalized product recommendations to each shopper. The widget can be placed in any layout, and the same widget instance can be shared over as many pages as necessary to provide recommendations to your shoppers.

Open Storefront Framework (OSF) includes its own Product Recommendations Carousel widget. This widget appears on the Product layout in the blank-store template that comes with OSF. For more information, see Develop and Deploy Applications.

For information on including recommendations in emails your store sends, see Customize Email Templates.

Manage personal data in product recommendations

The Product Recommendations widget collects personal data as defined by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, if you have configured your site to request cookie consent, and the shopper has declined to provide that consent, the widget does not capture or use personal data for the visit. Specifically, the Product Recommendations widget checks for the existence of the GDPRCookieP13nConsentGranted cookie. If the cookie is not present on the shopper’s browser, personal data is not collected. Cross-session recommendations are not available for the shopper, and the Most Recently Viewed strategy is not maintained for the shopper. The shopper is thus treated as a new, unknown shopper for each session.

For detailed information on how to configure your site to request consent, refer to Manage the Use of Personal Data.

Add Images to Products

Use a product’s Media tab to upload and arrange product images that will appear on your store.

You can upload JPG, PNG, and GIF files. Retail Digital Commerce automatically sizes your images for display on different devices, such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.

Note:

This section describes how to upload images to individual products. See Manage Media for Your Store for information about using the media library, including information about uploading a ZIP file of images and other types of media that are automatically assigned to products and collections in your catalog.

This section includes the following topics:

Add and Assign Images

If you upload multiple images, the first image displayed on the Media tab is used as the primary image for the product. To see how images will be displayed on your store, go to the Design page and select the Product layout. For more information about layouts, see Design Your Store Layout.

To add an image to a product:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product to which you want to add images.
On the product’s Media tab, click Add Images and select Upload New.
Select an image to upload.
You can upload only one image at a time. If you select a file with the same name as a file you already uploaded, the new file replaces the existing one.
Click Save.

To assign an image to a product from the media library:

On the Catalog page, open the product to which you want to add images.
On the product’s Media tab, click Add Images and select Media Library.
Select images to assign to the product and click Add.
For details about selecting, sorting, and searching for images in the media library, see Manage Media for Your Store.
Click Save.

Manage Images for Variant Values

If you specified that product images should be displayed at the variant property value level, you can assign a separate main image to the product for each value. For example, you can assign a separate image to each color.

To manage images for variant values:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product whose images you want to manage.
On the product’s Media tab, select a variant value from the drop down list.
By default, Always Shown is selected. This means that the same image is displayed for each of the values.

Note:
If you uploaded a ZIP file of images that were automatically assigned to the product, those images are assigned to Always Shown. See Automatically assign images to products and collections for more information.
To add an image for the selected value, click Add Images and select either Upload New or Media Library.
Select an image to upload or assign.
You can assign more than one image to each value.
Repeat steps 2 through 4 for each value that requires images.
Click Save.

Add alt Text and Titles to Images

Alt text and titles provide descriptions of images assigned to products and collections.

Search engines index alt text and use it to return images for user queries. Alt text is also used when shoppers cannot view images on the web. For example, a blind shopper’s screen reader reads an image’s alt text when it reaches the image on a category page on your store.
A title is used as a tooltip, or hover text, when a shopper points to the image.

By default, Retail Digital Commerce uses a product or collection’s name for both the alt text and title text for all images assigned to that product or collection. You can edit the default alt text and title text on the product or collection’s Media tab.

Note:

You can also add keywords, titles, and descriptions to products and collections. See Add metadata to products and collections for more information.

To edit an image’s alt text and title:

On the Catalog page, open the product or collection whose image you want to edit. Click the Media tab.
Hover over the image and click the Edit current image icon when it appears. A new screen displays containing the image properties.
To change the current Alt Text you must check Edit Manually and enter the new text in the text box.
To change back to the default alt text, check Edit Manually and click Reset Default.
To change the current Title you must check Edit Manually and enter the new one in the text box.
To change back to the default title, check Edit Manually and click Reset Default.
Click Save.

Reorder Images

The first image displayed on a product’s Media tab is used as the primary image for the product on your store. The remaining images are displayed on the product details page in the order they appear on the Media tab.

To reorder images:

On the Catalog page, open the product whose images you want to reorder. Click the Media tab.
To make an image the primary image for the product, do either of the following:
- Drag the image to beginning of the list.
- Hover over the image and click the star icon when it appears.

Remove Images

When you remove an image from a product, you cannot access it again with the Retail Digital Commerce tools. If you remove the primary image, the next image on the Media tab becomes the primary image. If you remove all images from a product, a placeholder is displayed on your store.

To remove an image from a product:

On the Catalog page, navigate to the product whose images you want to remove.
On the product’s Media tab, select an image click the X icon when it appears.

Tip:

To remove multiple images, select all the images you want to remove and then click the X icon on any of them.
Confirm that you want to remove the selected images.

Create Gift Cards

This section describes how to add gift cards to your catalog.

You create a gift card just as you do any other product in your catalog. Retail Digital Commerce does not support electronic gift cards. You can sell only physical gift cards that are shipped to shoppers.

To add gift cards to your catalog:

(Optional) Create a collection for gift cards. You can also add your gift cards to any existing collection in your catalog.
If your store sells different styles of gift cards, create a new product type for gift cards. You will use the product type to add variant properties for the different types of cards or envelopes you want to offer. For example, the variant property Card Style could have the values Classic, Happy Birthday, and Congratulations.
If your store sells only one style of gift card, you do not have to create a product type. Simply use the base product type.

For more information, see Create and edit product types.
Create a new product with the Gift Card or base product type.
The List Price property specifies the gift card’s denomination. You must create a separate product for each denomination. For example, if your store sells gift cards in $25, $50, $75, and $100 denominations, you must create four gift card products.

For more information, see Create and work with products.
Create SKUs for each gift card. For more information, see Create and work with SKUs.
Add images for the gift cards. For more information, see Add images to products.
(Optional) If your store uses a branded name for your gift cards, you can replace the phrase “gift card” with that name in places such as your checkout page. For more information, see Customize your web store's text.

Manage Inventory

By default, Retail Digital Commerce maintains one set of inventory values for each SKU.

This section describes how to view and update the inventory and stock threshold for each product and SKU in your catalogs. Additionally, you can use the Retail Digital Commerce Admin API to perform the following inventory tasks:

Manage preorder and backorder counts and thresholds. See Manage Inventory for Preorders and Backorders for more information.
Maintain inventory for specific locations, such as stores and warehouses. See Manage Multiple Inventory Locations for more information.
.

Important:

The inventory list includes both published and unpublished products. You do not have to publish inventory changes. Changes you make to inventory for published products are immediately visible on your store. Changes you make to inventory for new (unpublished) products will appear on your store with the rest of the product information the next time you publish changes.

To add or update inventory:

On the Catalog page, click Manage Catalogs, then select Inventory.
The Inventory page is empty until you search for products or SKUs.
In the search box, type or paste full or partial product names, SKU IDs, or both.
- Separate multiple entries with commas.
- You can mix names and IDs in the same search.
- The search will not start if you enter just a comma, even if your catalog includes products whose names include commas.
- There is a limit of 1000 characters and 200 search terms, whichever comes first. If there are more than 200 search terms, all terms past 200 are ignored. If there are duplicate IDs, any ID past the first is ignored.
Retail Digital Commerce displays the following inventory details for each product or SKU:
- Inventory count: The number of items that are physically in stock.
- Stock threshold: A value you specify that indicates when an item should display as out-of-stock on your storefront. An item is considered out-of-stock when the inventory count is less than or equal to the stock threshold value.
- Status: Icons that specify if a SKU or product is out-of-stock or if a product includes some SKUs that are out-of-stock.
Double-click the SKU's inventory count and enter a new value. You must enter an integer.
Press Enter to save the new value and move to the inventory count of the next SKU in the list. You can also click somewhere else on the page to save the new value without moving to the next SKU.
(Optional) Double-click the SKU's stock threshold and enter a new value. You must enter an integer.
Press Enter to save the new value and move to the stock threshold of the next SKU in the list. You can also click somewhere else on the page to save the new value without moving to the next SKU.

Note:

You can quickly make a number of inventory changes at once by importing them. For more information, see Import and Export Catalog Items and Inventory.

Customize Inventory Status Messaging

You can view and update the inventory status message that displays to your shoppers. The messaging displayed to shoppers is configurable , as follows:

Open the Design page and click the Layout tab.
Open the Product layout and click the Grid View option.
Locate the Product Details widget and open the Settings icon, visible on the top right corner of each widget.
Click the Layout option to display the elements and select Inventory Status.
You can now see the Product Details widget inventory status tabs, allowing you to customize the messaging displayed for each of the different statuses:
- In Stock
- Out of Stock
- PreOrder
- BackOrder
Add your message to the relevant inventory status.
Customize the message settings, and preview.
Click Done to save your configurations, and Save to exit the widget settings.

Preview Your Changes

Before you publish any changes, preview them so you can see how they will appear on your live store.

To launch a preview session at any time, click the Preview button. The preview session launches in a new browser tab or window. If your instance supports more than one store, select the store to preview from the drop-down list at the top of the preview window. To end the preview session, simply close that tab or window.

Nothing you do in a preview session affects your production storefront.

You can apply the following settings to a preview session:

Audience shows how the store looks to specific groups of shoppers.
Account shows how an account-based store looks to shoppers associated with a specific account.
Date shows how the store looks at a specified future date and time.
Viewport shows how the store’s pages look on different devices, such as desktops and mobile phones.

Preview a Store by Audience

Audiences help you target content to certain groups of shoppers. Previewing a store as a member of an audience shows how the store looks to a shopper who is a member of the audience. See Define Audiences to learn how to create and use audiences.

To preview a store as the member of an audience:

Click the Preview button to launch a new preview session in a new tab or window.
Click the Site Preview Settings icon.
On the Display tab, click the Audience box and select an audience from the list. You can filter the list by typing or pasting some text in the Audience box.
You can add more than one audience, but you can select only one at a time.
Click Apply.

If you select a disabled audience, Retail Digital Commerce treats it as enabled during the preview session.

If you select more than one audience, Retail Digital Commerce displays the content based on the priority of each audience assigned to a content variation slot. See Customize slotsfor more information.

Preview a Store by Viewport

Previewing a store by viewport lets you see how the store’s pages look on different devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

To preview a store by viewport:

Click the Preview button to launch a new preview session in a new tab or window.
Click the Site Preview Settings icon.
On the Display tab, select a viewport breakpoint to preview.
XS (extra small resolutions)

SM: (small resolutions)

MD: (medium resolutions)

LG: (large resolutions)
Click Apply.

Preview a Store by Date and Time

Previewing a store by date and time lets you see how the store’s pages look if your changes were published at a future date and time. The date and time filter allow you to view the following types of content:

Promotions and promotional content scheduled for a future date and time.
Widgets configured in slots against a future date and time.

Retail Digital Commerce evaluates preview dates and times based on the date and time on the server.

To preview a store by date and time:

Click the Preview button to launch a new preview session in a new tab or window.
Click the Site Preview Settings icon.
In the Date field, click the calendar icon and select a date. Click the clock icon to set the hour, minute, and AM/PM portions of the time. .
Click Apply.

Preview an Account-based Store

Previewing an account-based store lets you see how the store looks to shoppers associated with different business accounts.

Retail Digital Commerce allows you to create accounts for companies that do business with you, such as manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. Each account represents a single organization and a unique customer.

For more information about account-based stores, see Configure Business Accounts.

6 Manage Your Catalog

Understand Catalogs

Work with Independent Catalogs

Work with Filtered Catalogs

Associate Catalogs with Sites or Accounts

Edit Catalog Items Without Publishing

Create and Edit Product Types

Create and Work with Products

Create Add-On Products

Organize Products in Collections

Configure Catalogs with Optional Collections

Link and Unlink Collections and Products

Create Default Parent Collections

Create Custom Properties for Collections

Add Metadata to Products and Collections

Display Related Products

Configure AI Recommendations Rules

Work with the Recommendations API

Display Product Recommendations

Add Images to Products

Create Gift Cards

Manage Inventory

Preview Your Changes