Definition: A Collection is a coherent set of products which are to be managed as a whole. Collections are used to organize a catalog in order to optimize the buying experience.

Collections offer an efficient way to enhance the customer experience when browsing through the catalog. Ideally, they should both “direct” the customer to the product he or she is looking for as

well as “invite” him or her to look at other products.

Collections can also offer an efficient way to manage the products; they allow looking up and gathering products, editing their business properties, their prices, etc. Obviously, a collection can be too voluminous or too heterogeneous to manage it ; at that point in time labels can be a handy option.

Definition: A Label is a special kind of collection that only contains products (it cannot contain collections or other labels). It can be used for different purposes: for internal management purposes, or to enhance the user experience by providing automatic filters. A label can typically represent a brand, or a product family.

For instance, the collection “shoes” can involve multiple labels that will classify the products under “sports shoes”, “classic shoes”, etc.

Although a collection makes up a set of products, it does not “own” them, meaning that a product can belong to multiple collections.

The process “Design Catalogs” is made of the following steps:

• This step allows creating a catalog from scratch. It will typically involve creating a structured navigation tree using collections as well as creating or importing products and services. Moreover, it allows defining labels to further organize the products & services.

• This step allows associating business property sets with collections or products, and entering the associated values.

• This step allows creating links between products. These links will enable you to identify better, replacing or even incompatible products for a certain product.

• This step allows managing the prices for products. Prices can be managed for standard items as well as for sales products.

• This step allows managing discounting.

• This step aims to optimize the buying experience for the end-user by introducing teasers (crosscollection short-cuts), by defining search criteria for every collection and by associating Guided Selling Processes to collections.

• The step “Access Rights” is used to define “visibility rights” on the catalog or collections. These will be used to restrict or allow access to certain users based on their profile or on the context.

• This step is used to set up the rules that have been defined in the previous “Access Rights” step.

• This step allows associating multimedia elements (text, files, images) to your catalog in order to visually enhance it or to enrich its specification.

• This step allows translating all of the information associated to the catalog.

• This step allows simulating the environment in which the catalog should appear.