Create products

The first product goes in by hand, even if you have 40,000 to import. Creating one manually surfaces modelling problems in ten minutes that an import would surface after 8,000 failed rows. Pick a real article, awkward attributes and all, and use the SKU your ERP uses.

Why the family comes first

In the Revenue Cloud a product carries no fixed columns. Which fields it has is decided by its family: hydraulic hoses have one family, bearings another, and each says which attributes exist and which are required. A new property such as voltage is a new attribute, not a new column. This is why "create a product" starts with choosing a family, and why the family is the expensive decision while the product is cheap. See How PIM works.

Create it

1. In Commerce Studio, go to PIM › Products.
2. Select New product.
3. Enter the SKU. This is the permanent identifier that your ERP, your imports and your customers' order lines all join on. Use the ERP's article number, exactly as the ERP writes it, leading zeros included.
4. Choose the family. This decides which attributes you see next.
5. If the article comes in sizes or lengths, also choose the family variant. The product is then a model, and you add its variants afterwards. Skip this for the first product; see Variants when you need it.
6. Save.

Fill it in

The edit screen shows the family's attributes, arranged in tabs by attribute group. Work through them with two selectors at the top of the screen in mind:

• The language selector. Localizable attributes are filled per language. Filling German does not fill English.
• The channel selector. Scopable attributes are filled per channel, so a punchout catalog can carry a shorter description than the webshop.

Watch the completeness indicator as you go. Reaching 100 % for one channel and one language tells you the family's contract is achievable with the data you have. If you cannot reach it, the family is asking for something you do not have, and that is a modelling problem worth fixing now, while one product exists.

Then the Categories tab: add the categories the product belongs in. A product can sit in several. Finally, pick an asset for the image attribute if the family has one; that becomes the thumbnail in lists and search.

Enable it

A product has an enabled flag, separate from completeness. Completeness says ready; enabled says published. Switch it on when you want the article live. If it then does not appear in the shop, the six usual causes are in Why a product is not showing up.

What to check

• Every attribute you expected is on the screen. If one is missing, it is not assigned to the family.
• Nothing appeared that makes no sense for this article. If it did, the family is too broad.
• Completeness reached 100 % for the channel and language you will launch in.
• The product shows up in PIM › Products with its family and its completeness in the list columns, and the dashboard's product count moved by one.

Fix the model now, while changing it costs nothing. Attribute types cannot be changed once data exists.

Then the rest of the catalog

One product proves the model. The other 40,000 come in through an import: prepare the file using attribute codes as column headers, then import it and read the three numbers it reports, created, updated and failed. A created count higher than you expected means the SKUs did not match and you may now have duplicates; stop and check before you carry on.

Next

• Configure pricing: the product exists, so it can have a price.
• Guide: Create a product in the Product data book.
• Product Help: Create product, the screen field by field.