Overview of the Sales Catalog

Salespeople enter the products or product groups that customers are interested in purchasing by making a selection from a sales catalog. They can either browse the catalog or start typing the product name to begin to associate products or product groups with business objects like opportunities and leads.

The sales catalog consists of a hierarchy of product groups. This hierarchy classifies and organizes the products in your catalog.

In addition:

• The catalog you create has a root product group that you build your catalog underneath.
  Note: The root product group is a placeholder for product managers to organize their sales catalog hierarchy. The root catalog typically isn't a sellable product. It's a placeholder used to traverse and list the product hierarchy in the product lists of values. In Oracle Sales in the Redwood UX, the root product group doesn't display in the UI like it does in classic Oracle Sales.
• You can include a description for each product group and product.
• You can upload one image for each product.
• There's no limit on the number of products you can have in a product group.
• You can use product groups as a dimension in your sales territories and for sales forecasting. During forecasting setup, you specify the number of levels in your sales catalog product group hierarchy that you want to forecast.

Using Products in the Sales Catalog

While you can create the sales catalog with only product groups, you must use products to take advantage of advanced sales features and to enable integrations with other Oracle cloud services, including Oracle Subscription Management and Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote (Oracle CPQ). These two products are key components in the Oracle Revenue Transformation Solution.

You can also use Application Composer to add fields and perform other modifications to products, a feature not available on product groups.

The products that you create get stored both in Sales and in Oracle Product Information Management (also called PIM or the "product model"). The product model serves as the master item repository for all front-office cloud services.

Sample Sales Catalog Flow and Structure

In Oracle Sales in the Redwood UX, salespeople add products within a business object like opportunities or leads by using the search bar. As they start to type, for example, "add product", the appropriate action appears for them to select. After they select the action, Add Products dialog appears where they can select and add products.

In classic Sales, the Product Catalog page gives salespeople a simplified shopping cart experience. They can search for a product and browse the product group hierarchy to add products to a lead or opportunity. This example image highlights three product groups in the All Categories section and also individual products in the Products section:

Salespeople can drill into the individual product pages to view the product description and an image. Here's a sample image of the product detail page for a fictitious product. The page includes the product name, the product description, and an image.

For example, the fictitious Vision Corp. uses product groups to assign specialists to help close deals on opportunities. They use a line of servers that the company has just launched. The company also creates forecasts for each server line.

Vision Corp. sells laptops and two types of servers: Green Servers and Sentinel Servers. To create the catalog, Vision Corp.:

1. Uses Vision Products as the root product group.
2. Imports the products underneath Vision Products.
3. Imports the remaining product groups and their associations with the products.

This diagram shows the configuration of the Vision Corp. sales catalog. The sales catalog consists of the root product group, Vision Products, with two child product groups representing the product types: Servers and Laptops. There are two product groups for the server families: Green Servers, and Sentinel Servers. Each server family includes three server products. The Green Server products are: Green Server 3000, Green Server 6000, and Green Server 9000. The Sentinel Server products are: Sentinel Server 1500, Sentinel Server 3000, and Sentinel Server 7000. The Ultra Laptop product group (a child of the Laptops product group) includes these products: Ultra Z15 Laptop, Ultra Z17 Laptop, and Ultra ZX15 Laptop.

Note: We highly recommend that you use the Setup Assistant to set up your catalog. The Setup Assistant creates the root product group for you and performs other steps that you'd otherwise need to do manually. See Overview of the Setup Assistant for more information.