Channels
The same product, a different cut per destination. This page is the Product-data-guide entry point; the full treatment of channels and languages together lives in the Localization & classification guide.
A channel is where business happens: your web shop, a punchout catalog for one corporate customer, a marketplace feed, the API, a point of sale. The product is the same in all of them. What differs is which products each destination may see, and what some fields say there.
Why one catalog needs several cuts
Take a wholesaler with a public shop and a punchout contract with one large customer. The buyer at that customer clicks through from SAP Ariba into your catalog. Two things must be true that are false for the public shop: they see only the 800 articles their purchasing department negotiated, and the description they see is the short, unformatted one their procurement system can display. Without channels you would run two catalogs. With them you run one, and the channel decides the cut.
What a channel decides
| Aspect | How the channel controls it |
|---|---|
| Which products appear | A product is assigned to channels. What an unassigned product does is a setting: Products with no assignment to this channel are Visible (open) or Hidden until assigned (closed), or Inherit from the tenant setting. |
| What a field says | An attribute marked Scopable (per channel) holds one value per channel. name-web and name-punchout are two values of one attribute. |
| What counts as complete | On the family, an attribute can be required for specific channels only (Required channels). Completeness for a channel measures only those. |
| Whether it serves at all | Status Active or Inactive. What inactive does is the tenant setting An inactive channel: a label only, or Serves nothing. |
| Which market | A channel belongs to one or more Markets, and with them to currencies, tax classes and locales. |
The open/closed choice is the one to get right first. The platform default is open: a product assigned to no channel is visible in every channel, which is correct for a shop and wrong for a punchout contract. The tenant-wide setting Products with no channel assignment are sets the default; each channel can override it for itself, so the shop stays open while the punchout channel serves only its assortment.
shop does not hide it from anything else. Under
the open default, assignment adds visibility; it does not restrict it. A
punchout channel that must show only its negotiated assortment needs
Hidden until assigned (closed) on that channel. Otherwise its buyer sees the
whole catalog.Set up a channel
- Go to Configuration › Channels and select New channel.
- Enter the Code: lowercase, letters, digits,
-or_, up to 63 characters, for exampleshoporpunchout-acme. Imports and integrations address the channel by it; it does not change afterwards. - Enter the Name and choose the Type. The tenant starts with
storefront,punchout,marketplace,apiandpos; add your own under Configuration › Channel types if you run a feed or a print export. - Select Create channel, then Edit channel to set Labels (i18n), Status, Products with no assignment to this channel are, Default channel and Sort.
- Back in the PIM, decide which attributes need a value per channel and mark them Scopable (per channel) under PIM › Data model › Attributes. Keep it to a handful.
- On the families that publish to this channel, set Required channels on the attributes the channel cannot do without.
- Fill the per-channel values, in the product workbench or through an
import with one column per
channel (
name-punchout). - Assign the products that belong in the channel. For a closed channel this is the assortment; nothing else will show.
Exactly one channel is the Default channel. Requests that name no channel
fall back to it, and it cannot be deleted while it holds the flag. Every tenant
starts with shop in that role.
What to check
- Open the channel list and read the Unassigned rows column. Every punchout and marketplace channel should say Hidden until assigned; the shop usually says Visible.
- Open a product that is not assigned to the closed channel and confirm it does not appear there.
- Filter completeness for the new channel. It will be lower than for the shop; that is the work list.
- Check the channel's Markets. A channel in no market has no currency and no tax class to render with.
Next
- Completeness and readiness
- Exports: an export channel is a channel like any other.
- How catalog translation works: the full treatment.