Sales catalogs

A sales catalog is a subset of the merchandise and services that are found in the master catalog.

You can create one or more sales catalogs for customer display purposes. A sales catalog has a flexible display structure that can associate products to more than one sales category, to suit the requirements of your store.

Sales catalogs can maintain an unlimited number of catalog hierarchies and place products in any number of locations within a single sales catalog structure. Sales catalogs can be used to create unique hierarchies and product assortments for seasonal purposes, targeting specific customer segments or business customers. For example, you can create a sales catalog to highlight new merchandise, seasonal merchandise such as a Summer or Winter catalog, or a particular product line.

Sales catalogs can be used with the master catalog and contracts to control which products display for a particular customer. If a customer is not entitled to see a subset of the products in the master catalog, the contract system makes sure that customer does not see those products in the WebSphere Commerce store. The sales catalog can then be used to organize the products that the customer is entitled to see and purchase in a more meaningful way. For example, customers can buy products to support a business project. Instead of organizing products by department and subdepartment, it might be easier for a customer to find products that are arranged to match the components of their project. In this scenario, a top-level category might be titled Network Replacement Project and the subcategories in the sales catalog would be Hardware and Software.

To construct your sales catalogs, you can use rule-based sales categories in addition to regular sales categories. Rule-based sales categories are a type of sales category that uses a search-based, user-defined rule with WebSphere Commerce search to find and automatically assign catalog entries to the category. For more information, see Rule-based sales categories.

Sales catalogs within the catalog asset store

You can create and manage sales catalogs within each individual store that you create. You can also create and manage sales catalogs within the catalog asset store when your site uses the extended sites store model. If you want the same sales catalog to be shared among each of the extended sites, you must add the sales catalog to the catalog asset store. You can still create a separate sales catalog within each extended site if you do not want every sales catalog to be shared. The following diagram describes this organization.

Displaying sales catalogs within a store

By default, WebSphere Commerce stores display the master catalog.

• A store developer must configure the store to display sales catalogs.

In the Catalogs tool, you can select a sales catalog to use as the default catalog for your store. For more information, see Default catalog.