Categories are high-level logical groupings of products, affecting the way the Sales rep sees them for selection on the Product Catalog. A category can be created for browsing products in the Catalog page or they can be created for creating options groups for a Bundle product. Products are associated to a category through a category hierarchy. Category hierarchies are maintained using the Hierarchy Manager. They are also used to group the total price of the products belonging in a category on the Cart Summary.

There are three types of category:

  • Offering: An Offering is a collection of products that an organization makes available to a customer. A Bundle or a Standalone product can be associated with an Offering category. If you are creating a category hierarchy for the first time, you need to create a new category through this method only. Most implementations will have an existing hierarchy.
  • Offering and Option Group: This category type groups products that can be used as a category and option group. For example, a keyboard can be sold as a standalone product and also as an option along with a bundle product (such as Desktop PC).
  • Option Group: Option Groups categorize multiple option products. Option products are associated to option groups, and option groups are further associated to bundle products, thus associating option to a bundle product. You can manage option groups in Manage Option Groups menu.

The following topics provide instruction to manage Categories and Category Hierarchy.

  • Creating Categories
    Categories are created to group products for the end user's product selection. Categories are also used to group options within bundles.
  • Creating Category Hierarchies
    Categories are created when a hierarchy needs to be created for the first time. Hierarchy defines the structure of the product catalog.
  • Running a Category Maintenance Job
    After making any change to category definition, category to product association, or hierarchy change, you must run a Category Maintenance job. This de-normalizes the hierarchy into a custom object for reporting and totaling purposes. If category maintenance is not run, the end user may see incorrect hierarchy or totals on the cart page. Making changes to existing categories or category hierarchies requires you to run the Category Maintenance batch job to maintain the hierarchy and associations.