Supplywise walkthrough - Products and pricing

Products

Supplier based products, most as type “Extended” and products are transformed to “Standard” when first order is created. The client has lots, more than 100000 products.

Products are automatically created in Norce from Supplier information and then enriched from an external Content system (Etilize), by the integration. Some manual enrichment happens later as well, but only for the primary Assortment.

Categories

Since their is a large assortment 4 levels of categories are needed. The categorization is based on segmentation of the business internally and also how the content provider has structured its data. How the products should be found on the online storefront is secondary and will be managed by a smart design of the CMS admin.

Example of categories

1. All products
   1. Electronics
      1. Conference
      2. Phones
      3. Sound
      4. TV
      5. Computers
         1. Laptops
         2. Workstations
         3. Accessories
         4. ...
      6. ...
   2. Office supplies
      1. ...
2. Non buyable products
   1. ...

A master level category of "all products" makes it possible to set business rules on all buyable products with one filter, excluding placeholders or containers.

Flags

TODO

Parametrics

TODO

Product types

The client uses several different product types to classify the different kind of products that are used. Here is a list of the different classes used by the client, what they do and how they are implemented in Norce Commerce.

Extended assortment

The client wants to be able to show a "long tail" of products that are not handled in all the back-end systems until there is an actual need for it. This makes it possible to "throw a large net" to attract customers and provide the ability to buy niched assortments but also to suggest better or cheaper alternatives, where possible.

Ordinary "Standard" products are handled fully in the ERP system, while "Extended" products resides only in Norce until they are bought.

Lifecycle and automations

Most products are created initially in Norce based on supplier data and creation rules. Later on they are enriched and made buyable.

See Suppliers for more.

Different assortments

Some assortments will be created directly in the ERP, after creation in Norce. This is done by the creation rule, setting the type to “standard” will trigger an event to the integration, that will create the product directly in the ERP.

Activation and deactivation

Extended products are automatically activated when they are in Stock at the supplier. While standard products are either manuallt activated or scheduled.

Standard products are deactivated when expiring and out of stock, while extended products are automatically deactivated when no supplier no longer sells them.

See more about status automation here.

PIM workflows and enrichments

Most enrichment is done automatically by integrations. The product managers has only a controlling role and are responsible for checking the quality and then activate the new products.

1. The creation rule will automatically categorize the product to the correct category. Default settings is therefore done.
2. The supplier integrations will lookup in Norce Commerce query, if the supplier skus are created and will then import product content from the supplier on their partno’s.
3. New Products are fetched from query (Coming, flag “content from etilize done” not set) and tries to be matched to products in etilize and then imported to Norce (could be done with Norce Events also).
4. The supplier import and etilize import will update their respective product flag, a product manager can the go in and validate the content.

Prices and Inventory

Prices

1. A base price list is used to create ALL products that any market or customer has on their assortment. This is the price list who has all the creation rules.
2. Each application has its own market price list, that inherits its assortment from the base price list, but can exclude products based on
   • Exclusion rules
   • No supplier exists that sells to the market
3. A market can have its own cost purchases based on supplier price lists specific for the market. (A supplier can have different price lists for different markets)
4. Customer specific price lists can be both maintained solely by the client (contract price list) or based on an agreement from the supplier (supplier price list)
5. Company discounts for medium sized customers
   • Category and (later) flag rules

Price rules

• On base price list, use Cost based prices, purchase cost for all extended assortment products and unit cost for standard products.
• Contract price lists uses fixed price
• Bid / agreement price lists uses purchase cost based prices, but using their own supplier price lists.

Price settings

Norce has enabled "discard public prices when price list seed is used" under client setting. This will make it possible to have more flexibility when showing prices to business customers. Agreements and customer discounts can be forced even if they are more expensive than the current campaigns. This is important is (for example) there is other non-monetary reasons for a more expensive agreement, like a longer warranty or higher service levels.

When this setting is enabled the storefront must add all price lists that should be part of the best price calculation directly to the parameter PriceListSeed.

Availability

• Local warehouse for core assortment, but most products are handled using suppliers and dropship
• No market specific warehouses, no store warehouses
• Much supplier focused availability calculation.
  See example 2 here Availability structure .