Catalogs

Catalogs are the basis for managing your product data. Especially if you sell on multiple platforms, you probably require a specific format for your product data and assortment of articles for each channel and/or target group.

To manage your product data, CloudSuite offers a large variety of catalog types and related features. You can exclude articles, create a catalog only for a specific group of customers, create a catalog for a specific branch, etc.

Catalog Types

With the comprehensive system of catalogs, you can personalize the assortments for shops, domains, customers, customer groups, and users. This means that each user of the webshop sees a personalized product catalog combined with navigation, search, and filtering of products.

Within the CloudSuite platform, you can define the types of catalog as explained in the following subheadings.

Standard Catalog

A collection of products that can be linked to all the above-mentioned entities. This is the base of the product assortment used within the shop. Of course, multiple catalogs can be linked to one entity.

The hierarchy of overruling the shop’s catalog is:

1. Webshop user
2. Customer
3. Customer group
4. Shop language
5. Domain
6. Industry
7. Shop

This means that if one or more catalogs are linked to a customer group, this is leading over the catalogs that are linked to entities at a lower level (shop language, domain, and shop). This cascading mechanism makes it easy to offer different products for a specific language, a domain, or (group of) customers.

Catalog before Login

If you want to publish a smaller assortment, before login, you can define catalogs on the default party of the shop. These catalogs will overrule the standard shop catalogs for users not yet logged in. It is also possible to define an Exclude Catalog before login, which results in publishing the standard shop catalog without the products in the exclude catalog.

Exclusive Catalog

An exclusive catalog is a standard catalog that contains products that are available for specific customers. This means that the products within these catalogs are not available to other customers and linked on customer level. These catalogs can be shared by multiple customers.

A product that is included in multiple exclusive catalogs, is seen by shop visitors who are linked to at least one of them.

Exclude Catalog

In a situation where a customer has access to all products in the shop, except for a small number of products (e.g. a specific brand) it is possible to define a so-called Exclude Catalog. Customers linked to this Exclude Catalog are no longer able to view or order the products that are added to this catalog.

When an Exclude Catalog has been applied to the shop, then this catalog applies to all customers in the shop.

Exclude from Search Catalog

This feature is used to bundle products in a catalog that can not be found by using the Search tool. When the product is linked to a tree or tag, the product can be found by these item names.

A possible use case is if you have products in your webshop that are also available as secondhand or showroom models. Using the Search will only show results for the new product. However, entering the tag showroom models will show a list of products linked to the tag or tree's showroom models.

Allowed Catalogs

These additional catalogs can be attached to the user, which results in a list-box with catalogs. This means that the user can switch easily between the catalogs.

Catalog Based on Filters

You can use a filter like a Tree or Brand to automatically add products to a Catalog that matches the applied filter. In addition, you can schedule builds and updates of the catalogs to keep them up to date with your latest products.

Supervised Catalog

When for specific products an authorization of a supervisor is needed, the catalog of these products can be attached to a user. When the order contains a product from the supervised catalog, the order will be presented to a supervisor for authorization. Providing this user does not order products from this catalog, the user is allowed to place orders.

Pre-Order Catalog

Pre-order catalogs are perfect for ordering products before they are in stock or released. Pre-order catalogs are generally used for fashion items and seasonal products that need to be ordered several months or longer in advance of the official release date.

The ordering process is slightly different than for the standard catalog. For instance, regarding stock control, allowing users to edit orders until the pre-ordering period is closed, setting an expiration date for pre-ordering or link specific delivery options.

Industry-Specific Catalog

This feature supports companies with a huge assortment of products for different industries, with customers that only operate in one specific industry.

• Each customer (“party”) can be linked to one industry.
• Each industry can contain one or more industry catalogs.
• Customer users can only view products that are part of the industry catalogs.

In My Account, users can switch on/off catalogs of interest. This way the user is able to restrict or extend the number of products in the webshop.

• B2B and B2C customers are able to switch catalogs through CloudSuite webshop from their account
• Select and add an industry in the registration form
• Overview under My Assortment
• Internal users can select catalogs for all related parties and have access to My Assortment
• User Cache is cleared automatically after saving the selection of industry catalogs on the webshop
• Validation on fields and buttons
• API-supported to create catalogs of industry types and to add industry to related parties.