Product Catalog and Online Store on the Internet (LO-MD-AM) (SAP Library - Product Catalog and Online Store on the Internet (LO-MD-AM))

Product Catalog and Online Store on the Internet (LO-MD-AM)

Use

The Internet Application Component Product Catalog provides you with a simple and efficient way of presenting your range of products effectively on the Internet.

Product catalogs are an important advertising medium which provides customers with product information. In the R/3 System, this information can include text, current prices, and multimedia objects such as pictures and audio clips.

An extension of this product catalog is the Internet Application Component Online Store. The interactive online store builds upon the basic product catalog functionality and also integrates customer data creation, order entry, and credit card payments capability. The online store is a virtual retail store, fully able to support sales transactions over the Internet.

The online store can also be used as part of an integrated solution, which allows you to do the following directly in the vendor's system during a procurement transaction:

Search for and select products

Request quotations

Create sales orders

The entire solution is based on interactive data exchange between the systems of two business partners. The supplier's system runs the Internet Application Component Product Catalog and Online Store, while the buyer's system runs SAP's Business-to-Business Procurement or Procurement via Catalogs.

Type of Internet Application Component

Consumer-to-Business

Business-to-Business

Internet product catalogs can be used in a variety of ways, such as mail order, wholesale (for instance, a business-to-business catalog for retailers), the component supply industry, or multimedia kiosk systems at the point of sale, where they can also be used by store personnel to show customers any products that might not be stocked in this store but which may be ordered.

Product catalogs bring considerable benefits in terms of the up-to-date nature of the information offered and its global availability. An Internet product catalog can be continually updated without incurring additional production expenses and is available to an immense, unlimited target audience. Product catalogs are also environmentally friendly: they require no paper and no other materials need to be consumed or processed.

When you create a product catalog on the Internet, no production costs are involved, whereas a paper or CD version can incur high costs in comparison. The Internet version also allows you to save on costs for the layout design, for instance, since the layout is automatically generated. It is considerably easier, faster, and more cost-effective to rectify errors in an Internet version than in a paper or CD ROM version. There are no distribution costs, as there is no need to ship the brochure.

If you use the Internet Application Component Online Store, then both you and your customer can enjoy further, significant benefits:

Benefits for the customer:

They can take direct action once they have decided to buy, without having to make a phone call or send a fax.

They can place orders at any time, day or night.

They always have up-to-date price information, and can have quotations created for them, including any applicable discounts or rebates.

They can check stock availability online, see the expected delivery date, and perhaps make changes to their order accordingly.

Benefits for you as the supplier:

You can increase your sales volume due to 24-hour-a-day, worldwide accessibility.

You receive sales orders directly online, as soon as they are entered. This enables you to react to your customers’ requirements very quickly.

Instead of your employees taking calls and entering sales orders, the customer does this directly, thus reducing your overhead.

From a single product catalog in R/3 you can create several different online stores on the web; for example, one for retail customers, one for wholesale customers, and one for franchisees. You can customize these so that the content and appearance is different in each case.

Integration

The Internet product catalog is based on the data from the Product Catalog component in the R/3 System. The planning of product catalogs in R/3 allows you to save, call up, and manage data that has been created in connection with advertising media such as catalogs, brochures, CD-ROM’s, online catalogs or multimedia kiosk systems. This data can be combined to suit your advertising requirements.

Note

You can find information about product catalogs in the R/3 System in the document Product Catalog.

Before online store customers place an order, the system asks them whether they are new or existing customers.

If they are new, there are two possible scenarios:

One-time customers are not permitted. In this case, customers are required to register. If they do, then R/3 creates a customer master record for them and assigns them a customer number and initial password.

One-time customers are allowed. In this case, customers do not register. Instead, they only need to enter basic data needed for the sales transaction, such as the address. R/3 will not create customer master records for these customers, since the data will not be needed for future use.

If they are existing customers, they are prompted to enter their password. After customers are registered, identified, or verified and they enter payment information, the transaction is complete. Customers can choose payment by invoice, credit card, or COD . For credit cards, you can determine whether authorization takes place online or offline. You can also determine whether customers are to receive a confirmation of the order via email or not.

The system proposes a delivery date, but the customer can override this and type in a different delivery date, if desired. The system will then check availability and verify whether the desired date can be met or not.

You can have a ship-to address that differs from the sold-to address. This is useful when customers want to have their merchandise delivered to the office rather than to their homes, or are purchasing gifts for others.

In addition to individual customers, you can also handle business-to-business transactions via the online store. Instead of requiring a personal name, the form requires the customer to enter up to four lines for the company address. As a minimum, an entry must be made on the first line.

Depending on whether the early registration flag in the Customer Management Profile is checked, you can also have customer-specific prices appear in the online store. See the Customer Management Profile for more information.

If for some reason an error occurs which causes an online store transaction to fail (for example, because something hasn’t been entered properly in the master data), then:

R/3 informs the customer that the transaction was not completed.

R/3 Workflow sends a message to the person responsible, indicating where the problem lies, so that he or she can resolve it.

Features

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

Strictly as a product catalog, for information purposes only.

As an online store, with integrated sales order entry and creation of customer master records.

As part of an integrated solution which involves interactive data exchange between the systems of two business partners. The supplier's system runs the Internet Application Component Product Catalog and Online Store, while the buyer's system runs SAP's Business-to-Business Procurement or Procurement via Catalogs.

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:

Overview of the shop (these are layout areas at the top level of the product catalog layout)

Detail screen for a shop

Product lists

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 HTML^Business 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.