Best Practices for Products

The following provides best practices for setting up your products:

Use Base Products

A powerful way to manage multiple products with similar characteristics is to use base products. Base products minimize catalog maintenance and provide data consistency.

A base product contains data that is passed down to its child products. Changes made to a base product are automatically inherited by its child products. This means you make a change once and that change also applies to all child products.

base products

Example

Shieldware, Inc., sells anti-virus software for personal and professional use. Their product Internet Security is sold in four versions:

  • Basic
  • Basic Extended
  • Professional
  • Enterprise

The four versions have similar characteristics and information, with slight variations. A base product called Internet Security is set up with the basic information that applies to all four versions of the product. The four child products inherit this information from the base product.

Use One Product for Multiple Languages

It’s possible that you have products that you want to provide descriptions for in multiple languages. Previously, you might have set up that product by entering it once for each language, such as:

one product multiple languages 1

In the Commerce Assistant, however, a single product ID can support multiple languages. You can keep your catalog short and easy to maintain. Enter your product once and then configure as many of the cleverbridge-supported languages you need for that one product.

one product multiple languages 2