Catalog
Your product catalog serves as a repository for storing, retrieving, sorting, and displaying products in a meaningful way. It's at the heart of how sellers and buyers interact with your marketplace.
Nautical provides a customizable product catalog for scalable product information management (PIM). At a high-level, the product catalog operates with the following data model:
- Product Type: A product type defines a template for similar products. Required by default but can be made optional.
- Attribute: An attribute allows you to define a characteristic or piece of information about a product or the different variations of a product.
- Product: A product represents a sellable good or service and acts as a parent structure for variants. Products themselves are not sellable.
- Variant: A variant is an item available for purchase. Each product must have at least one variant. Products with multiple purchase options can have many variants.
- Category: Categories are used to create a hierarchical organization of products on a storefront, allowing users to easily navigate through them. Each product must be assigned to a single category.
- Collection: A collection is a group of products that can be featured on the storefront to make them easier for buyers to find. Products can be added to collections in addition to being organized into categories
Product types
A product type acts as a template for similar products. Products inherit the settings from their product type, including the following:
- Which attributes are available to products and variants
- Whether products are physical or digital
- The default tax code
You must add a product type before you can add a product. Each product can map to only one type. A product type can contain any number of products.
You can design your product types to be as broad or specific as needed. Capturing too much information in one product type can lead to a complex data model, while creating too many product types can make it challenging for sellers to find the appropriate one when creating products. Before creating product types, consider the shared characteristics of your products and find a balance that works for you and your sellers.
Attributes
An attribute defines a characteristic, or piece of information, about a product. You can define attributes at either the product or variant level.
- Product Attributes: Define common details at the product level that apply to all variants.
- Variant Attributes: Define the variations of a product, that is, the different options for which the product is available for purchase.
For example, a shirt may have a product attribute for material and variant attributes for size and color.
Attributes are an important aspect of the marketplace experience for both sellers and buyers. They allow sellers to categorize and present their products, while enabling buyers to filter and browse products more efficiently.
Avoid adding more attributes than necessary. You can always add more attributes, but it's difficult to remove an attribute already in use.
Products
A product represents an abstract sellable good. Products themselves are not sellable. Instead, they act as a parent structure for one or more product variants and reflect the common details of their product variants.
Products are typically based on a product type template selected when created. They can only use values of the attributes related to the selected product type. Products can be physical or digital, based on the product type template.
Variants
A variant is a specific sellable good or service. Inventory is modeled by variants and variants are generally mapped to specific stock keeping units (SKUs). Variants are defined using variant attributes. For example, the size and color of a shirt.
To keep your shopping experience simple and easy to navigate, it’s generally better to have many products with fewer variants than fewer products with many variants.
Categories
Categories organize products into a tree hierarchy to create a navigation structure in your storefront. A category tree can have multiple subcategories and can be as deep or shallow as desired.
A product must be assigned to a category before it can be created. Each product can only be assigned to a single category.
How you structure your categories is an important decision for your storefront. You can create categories to group product characteristics, marketing concerns, or search concerns. Think of how your buyerss will navigate through your storefront and how categories can make finding products easy.
Keep category trees exposed on the storefront simple. Too deep of a navigation structure can be overwhelming and make it difficult for users to navigate your storefront.
Collections
A collection is an optional way to group products together. In contrast to categories, collections are flat and do not support a nested structure.
Collections can be leveraged for a wide range of uses. You can use collections as a marketing tool or as an internal grouping structure not exposed to the storefront. When displayed on the storefront, collections can provide buyers with a curated shopping experience and help boost sales.
Some examples of when a collection might be useful include:
- Featuring products for seasonal events
- Curating an email campaign with featured products
- Displaying add-on products that are frequently purchased together
- Tracking certain products internally
In this section
Structuring your catalog What to consider as you map out your catalog structure.
Products Add, remove, and edit products, descriptions, and images.
Attributes Determine attributes used to create product types.
Product types Define types of products you sell.
Categories Gather products by type to make it easier for both admins and buyers to browse the store.
Collections Group products from the same or different categories into collections that encourage upselling.