Features of the Product Catalog and Online Store 

Use

It is possible to implement the Internet Application Component Product Catalog in two different ways:

If you choose the online store, your customers will be able to place their orders directly on the Internet.

In either case, the Internet product catalog consists of several levels:

  1. Overview of the shop (these are layout areas at the top level of the product catalog layout)
  1. Detail screen for a shop
  1. Product lists
  1. Detail screen for the product

You can easily switch from one level to another in the Internet product catalog.

Text, pictures, and sound extracts can be used for shops and product lists.

Normally an article can have up to three multimedia objects assigned to it: a large image, a small image, and a sound file. You can change the Customizing settings to display additional multimedia objects (for example, .avi or .wav files). You assign these objects in product catalog maintenance and they will appear as hyperlinks in the online store at the product detail level. Depending on whether the customer's browser or viewer application supports a particular file format, clicking on a hyperlink will cause the object to be displayed or be downloaded to his or her PC. Images in .jpg or .gif format will appear as thumbnails next to the hyperlinks.

Multimedia objects are not normally shown in lists, but you can change the Customizing settings and alter the HTMLBusiness template so that they do appear in lists as well as for individual shops and products.

From a single product catalog you can create several different online stores on the web; for example, one for retail customers and one for wholesale. You can customize these so that the content and appearance is different in each case.

Search functions help customers select the product they want. They can, for example, display a list of products that fall within a specific price interval. Alternatively, they can enter the name of the product, which enables them to branch directly to the detail screen of the product they are looking for. They can start the search either from within a shop or from the shop list, and choose whether the search is to apply only to a specific shop or to the entire store. They can also choose between simple search (that is, search by subject) and advanced search (search criteria are specified separately).

Sort functions help customers arrange product lists according to product name, product category, or price.

Filtering allows you to hide or display certain layout areas for certain customers based on settings in the customer profile, plus characteristics you assign to layout areas in the Classification System. You assign a class to a layout area in the Classification System, then you assign characteristics to the class. In Customizing you define a function module which determines customer-specific characteristics. If the customer-specific characteristics values match the characteristic values for a layout area, the layout area will be displayed for the customer; otherwise, it will be hidden.

Suppose you are a large electronics firm that does both retail and wholesale business. You want your wholesale customers to be able to order industrial supplies and equipment, but you want to restrict your individual consumers to small components for hobbyists.

You have defined a characteristic called CUSTOMER_TYPE, which can have values CONSUMER and WHOLESALE.

For your customers, you assign characteristic values as follows:

For your catalog layout areas, you assign characteristic values as follows:

In this case, John Doe sees only the catalog section where small electrical components appear, but Electronics-for-Less sees only industrial supplies and equipment.