A Quick Summary

Catalogs typically include product information in many formats, including text, images, PDFs, and more.  And some catalogs contain millions of products.  In many cases, a catalog is also a sales tool that lists available products and lets customers browse them in a convenient way.  Often, the catalog is the only point of contact a customer will have with the vendor, thereby making the presentation of information — both the organization and design — crucial to creating a distinct brand identity.

Creating and maintaining a product catalog or several catalogs isn't always as easy as it sounds.  Aggregating all the diverse data, matching up syntax and structure, and keeping that data updated can be a difficult undertaking.  On top of all that, factor in warehousing, inventory management, and each company’s unique business processes and you can easily have a big mess on your hands.

So What’s New?

The new G5 eCommerce Framework Catalog system has all the features that one would expect from an enterprise-level solution including out-of-the-box support for: multiple sites, multiple catalogs, multiple currencies and multiple languages.  The basic idea is that catalogs are merely “containers” that reference actual sellable items defined by a certain set of variations (i.e. size and color). 

These variations are sold as SKUs in our Catalog subsystem.  In addition, to individual product variations, one can set up everything from packages (or a collection of items), bundles (the best example is a computer since it is a collection of items that cannot be sold individually), and dynamic packages (or a collection that can be dynamically configured by the customer).  And if companies are looking for even more control, we have introduced the notion of associations or relationships between products to handle specialized cases.

Underneath all of this is a rich metadata and template engine which allows catalog or product administrators to configure a custom set of attributes for every type of product dynamically and have that information displayed according to pre-determined layouts assigned to each product page on the public ecommerce site.

• High Level Feature List
• Multiple sites
• Multiple catalogs
• Multiple currencies
• Multiple languages
• Support for product variations, packages, bundles and dynamic packages
• Associations – the ability to create relationships between products and hierarchies across catalogs
• Aggregate content from multiple catalogs
• Catalog ranking/Sort order
• Support for seasonal catalogs (including the ability to activate or deactivate products/catalogs on particular dates)
• Support for Min/Max quantity for SKUs
• Warehouse and inventory tracking support (i.e.” in stock,” reserved, pre-orders, back orders)
• Support for dates when pre-orders and back orders are available
• Search Engine Optimization using “friendly” names and meta keywords
• Unlimited Number of Custom Attributes
• Define Searchable Attributes
• Catalog import/export
• Catalog definition/schema management
• Uses Catalog XSD format
• Full-text search for inflectional, weighted, proximity searches
• Time-based caching for catalog objects
• Metadata engine for dynamic rendering of product attributes
• Template engine

As you can see, there is a wealth of features in ECF G5.  But much more than trying to stuff every feature known to humankind in our base product, the flexible architecture allows professional developers, IT organizations, and systems integrators the ability to take the source code and customize the catalog to suit their business needs.