Catalogs
When you set up a storefront, you must create a catalog, which is a container for one or more categories and is typically the first item you create in the business tools. You can use categories and subcategories to group products within a catalog and to organize the navigation of your storefront. For example, in the sample Habitat catalog, products are organized into Departments and these departments render on the live storefront as categories on the main navigation bar. When customers navigate to a category page that contains child categories, the subcategory navigation SXA component renders the child categories.
A product is a physical item (such as headphones) or a nonphysical item (such as digital goods like a warranty plan) that you manage within an online catalog. You can associate products with multiple catalogs and categories, and each product can be rendered and behave differently on the live storefront depending on your merchandising needs.
There are various types of products (also referred to as sellable items):
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Standalone products where the product has no variants.
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Products with variants (for example, a refrigerator that is available in white or stainless steel).
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Product bundles, which consist of several products grouped together and sold as one product.
Searches on the storefront result in multiple hits for the same product unless products are only organized at the lowest level in the content tree (for example, in the Habitat catalog, Storefront/Catalogs/Habitat_Master/Audio/Car Speakers
is the lowest level folder and where all car speakers should be found). Secondly, you must select the Include subcategory products check box under <site>/Settings/Commerce/Catalog Configuration
folder in the Content Editor.
When you create a site and build out your storefront, you can:
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Select the Commerce Storefront Habitat Catalog if you want to use sample data on your storefront for the purpose of design and testing.
Or
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Associate a catalog to the site at any point after the site creation.
You cannot associate the same catalog with two different sites. To achieve this, you must clone the catalog.
When a catalog is associated with a site, it is available in the Content Editor in the Catalog folder at /sitecore/Content/<Tenant>/<Site>/Home/Catalog where you can configure the catalog.
Habitat catalog
The Habitat catalog contains sample data structured so that products associated with a subcategory are also associated with the higher-level category. In the following example, the Departments item contains the sub-category Connected home, which in turn contains a sub-category called Appliance and Outlet Control. All sub-categories beneath the Department item are displayed along the top of the live storefront as a navigation strip. All the sub-categories beneath the Appliances and Outlet Control item are displayed to the left of the live storefront in a navigation box.