Merchandising
Sitecore XC supports the creation and management of catalogs, categories, and sellable items including product bundles.
The following diagram is a high-level view of the organization of merchandising items:
The Discover Sitecore channel includes several videos on catalogs including the catalog system deep dive and how to manage products and categories.
Catalogs and categories
You can use categories and subcategories to group sellable items within a catalog and to organize navigation of your site. For example, when customers navigate to a parent level category on your site, subcategories appear, and customers can quickly navigate to the sellable items they want to view.
You can have any number of catalogs and categories that group sellable items (products) into groups for different purposes. For example, you can have one catalog that contains all of your sellable items, and another that contains only a subset of those sellable items, such as a holiday sale with different pricing rules for those sellable items.
How you structure your catalogs can impact performance when you access a parent item (for example, when you expand the parent node in the Content Editor). To avoid this issue, minimize the number of child items contained within any one parent item.
Sellable items and product bundles
A sellable item can be a physical sellable item (such as a stereo) or it can be a digital item (which is a non-physical sellable item, such as a warranty plan). Sellable items can have variants with different properties. For example, in the Habitat catalog, the InstaClix camera comes in several colors and each color is a sellable item variant. A sellable item (or sellable item variant) is an individual item that you manage using the Business Tools.
You can associate sellable items with multiple catalogs and categories, and each sellable item can be displayed and behave differently according to your merchandising needs.
Sellable items can be related to each other through relationships such as cross-sells and up-sells, and relationship data can be shown on category or sellable item pages to support any related sellable items and categories. You can use images to help describe a sellable item, which you add using the Sitecore Media Library.
And, you can group sellable items into product bundles that you can add to catalogs, categories, or subcategories and manage in the same way as you manage other sellable items.