Product Sharing: Main Concepts

This section describes the main concepts involved in product sharing.

• Channel Assignments

  Sales or partner organizations select the channels with which they intend to share product data.

  Note: Sharing relations can only be established with channels that do not syndicate products from parent organizations.

  Generally, the assigned channels are intended to just reuse the original master product data. They can, however, still add new products or apply some channel-specific changes to master products (except for shared product variations, bundles and retail sets).

  For details about managing channel assignments, see Managing Product Sharing to Channels.

• Product Assignments

  For every sharing relation, i.e., for every assigned channel, the parent organization defines the scope of products to be shared. The available options are: nothing, all, or by sharing group.

  For details about managing product assignments, see Managing Product Assignments and Managing Sharing Group Product Assignments.

• Sharing Groups

  Sharing groups are a means to define reusable product sets intended to be shared. The available products are retrieved from the master repository via product selection rules or via simple or advanced search, with the result to be assigned completely or partially through selecting individual products. Using this mechanism, parent organizations can group, for example, products of a specific manufacturer or of a specific price range.

  For details about managing sharing groups, see Managing Sharing Groups.

• Manufacturer Aliases

  With respect to product sharing, Intershop Commerce Management introduces "manufacturer aliases". Using aliases, organizations can specify new manufacturer names intended to represent one or more actual manufacturers. This eases the handling of multiple manufacturers that, based on their offering, could be grouped, or manufacturers that appear in more than one spelling, for example.

  Note: Manufacturers assigned to a manufacturer alias are no longer available individually for being retrieved in sharing groups but only with their common alias name.

  For details about managing manufacturer aliases, see Manufacturer Alias Management.