External Catalog Integration (via OCI)

You can set up your Web shop to access third party vendor product catalogs, as if these catalogs were an integral part of your own Web shop. The integration of external catalogs, via open catalog interface (OCI), extends the range of products available to customers in your Web shop. The OCI enables your system to read product catalog data from external systems, thus enabling customers to buy products from external catalogs via your Web shop.

Advantages of using an external catalog are that you maintain external products in your SAP CRM product master, but you do not need to maintain them in your product catalog. In addition you can take advantage of enhanced details in the external catalog, meaning you do not need to provide these enhancements in your own catalog. For example, you can use external catalogs with enhanced visual features, but there is no maintenance from your side.

In CRM Web Channel you can provide a link to one external catalog in your Web shop. Your customers enter the external catalog by clicking on a URL and can browse the catalog and select products. The products are then automatically entered by the system into the customer’s shopping basket in your Web shop.

Prerequisites

You have maintained external products in the SAP CRM product master.
You have installed the SAP Web AS Java 7.00 server, deployed the B2B Web shop application, and made the relevant external catalog settings. For further information on configuring these applications, see the E-Commerce basic setting configuration documentation in SAP Solution Manager.
Your product catalog is OCI compliant. For more information on OCI compliancy and certification, see the documentation on the ICC Web site at www.sap.com/icc Integration Scenarios SAP Developer Network Supplier Relationship Management .

Features

Standard External Catalog Integration

Retrieve standard product data

In this case the system retrieves the following standard product data from the external product catalog:

Product ID
Quantity
Unit of Measurement

User Exits

Additional data
In addition to the data mentioned above, you can create a user exit to retrieve further data from the external catalog. In this case, you can choose to retrieve any product details you wish from the external catalog.
Customer-specific customization of an external catalog

You can create an OCI user exit to enable your customers to use customer-specific functions in the external catalog. That is to say, you can adapt the external catalog URL with various customer-specific parameters, so that customers see different views, or use different functions, in the external catalog, according to the parameters assigned. For example, you can limit the products the customer can view, or match the product views to the customer’s personal profile.

For more information on settings up user exits, see the Development and Extension Guide - SAP E-Commerce 5.0 on the SAP Service Marketplace at service.sap.com/crm-inst mySAP Business Suite Solutions mySAP CRM mySAP CRM2006s SAP CRM 5.1 Server and Standalone Components

Set up pricing recalculation

You can set up your system so that SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC) automatically recalculates product prices in the shopping basket, for example if the customer changes the quantity of items chosen, or deletes a product. This means that the customers does not have to delete the current product and go through the selection process again, just to get the correct price.

Extended External Catalog Integration

In addition to the above features, you can extend the set up of your external catalog integration. In this case you can set your system up to retrieve the following additional product data from the external catalog:

Price (net)
Currency
Price unit
Product description

More Information

For more information on configuring your system to enable external catalog integration in the Web shop, see the configuration documentation for CRM Web Channel in SAP Solution Manager.