Working with Product Relationships 

Product relationships are useful for merchandising and for defining structural compatibility between different products or sets of products. MDM offers two mechanisms for representing product relationships, which can be defined at the category level (for efficiency) and at the individual product level (for precision), as follows:

·        Category-level. You can define a relationship between two product categories. For example, you can define the categories “Washers” and “Dryers” as being related. This approach is efficient not only to define but also to maintain because new products that are added to either category automatically participate in the relationship, but it does not provide very granular control over the members of the relationship.

·        Product-level. You can also define a relationship between two or more individual products. For example, you can define a particular washer/dryer combination as being related, because they are designed to stack one on top of another. This approach is very precise, but also has additional overhead because each relationship must be individually defined, and new products that are added to the repository must be added manually as members of the relationship.

 

The different types of category- and product-level relationships are hierarchically illustrated in the figure below.