By exporting your inventory to CDON Marketplace, your products will be added to the CDON product catalog, which makes them available to CDON’s customers.
In the CDON Marketplace import process, there are two vital key concepts; data types and receipts. Deliveries are made by posting different types of data, which populate a product with all necessary information. The receipt is used to keep track on the progress of the import.
Conceptual overview:
Each delivery is imported independently. When data of all types is available, the final product is assembled and added to the product catalog for presentation.
Data assembly:
The Import Process
Data in a delivery is passed through a series of sequential steps which make out the import process. During this process, the data is validated and may be modified according to the current business rules.
Deliveries containing multiple products are split up into individual products, which in turn are imported independently from each other.
Products that fail validation are naturally not imported, but will not abort the entire delivery. Only products whose content has changed (since the last import) will be updated — unmodified data will be discarded early in the process.
Caution
An inventory import is greedy, which means that any and all products that can be imported will be imported.
The Product
The concept of a product is manifested by two types:
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Simple Product
- A single, indivisible product, i.e. a “regular” product.
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Product with Variations
- Multiple products that are considered “the same”, but varies on a specific property.
It is important to understand the distinction between these. A variation product is e.g. a beverage with different flavor variants, or a t-shirt in different sizes, etc. Correctly defining a product makes it easier for the customer to find and buy the product.
Variation Products
If the product has variations, the “parent” product is called the model product.
The model product is the common denominator which attributes shared properties to the variation products and creates the context which relates all variations to each other.
It is not possible to buy the model product, but it invites the customer to decide on one of its variations.