Products

A product in Bizzkit PIM, also called a product catalogue item, represents a physical product or a service in the form of a stock keeping unit (SKU), master, variant, bundle, or any combination thereof.

Products only have a few standard properties by default, called master data properties. All other properties, for example a product description or image or even more specific properties for storing domain or business specific information, can be stored on products using attributes.

Products are often organized using master-variant hierarchies. This allows for more efficient data modelling, as properties of product families can be reused by or overwritten on a lower level in the hierarchy.

The product catalog in Bizzkit PIM is where products are being managed and where they primarily can be searched for. Dashboards provide insight in the product catalog as well, and are often used for displaying product data in a way that is relevant for the user's context.

Master data properties

Products in Bizzkit PIM have a few master data properties, which are always available on each product in the product catalog.

Unique name

A product always has a unique name, as this is the unique identifier for products in Bizzkit PIM. It is mandatory to provide a unique name on creation of a product.

The unique name should be between 1 and 200 characters in length and cannot have leading or trailing spaces. As the name implies, a product's unique name is only valid if its value is unique across the entire product catalog.

Changing a product's unique name

It is possible to change products' unique name if the read-only flag is disabled under Administration -> Preferences. Changing the unique name of products should be considered carefully though, as this could impact external integrations with Bizzkit PIM. The unique name is the identifier for products on API level, so if a product's unique name is changed, it could result in broken integrations such as import jobs.

Product name

The product name is a human readable optional property that allows to easily identify products. It is formed by a string segmented by translation culture and opposite to unique name it is not an identifier and doesn't need to be unique.

The motivation for this property comes from the realization that unique names can be non-readable (fx. could contain only numbers or complex identifiers). Hence, when referencing a product by default the UI will display the product name if present, otherwise it will default to the unique name. The latter also applies to dropdowns for selecting products.

External Id

There are two fields for storing an external identifier on a product: External Id (text) for string based identifiers and External Id (numeric) for numeric identifiers. Typically only one of these two fields is used, but it is possible to use them both at the same time.

The purpose of the external id is to have an option of storing identifiers coming from another system than Bizzkit PIM, for example an ERP system. This way products are easily identified when working with synchronization of an external system with Bizzkit PIM.

State

The state property indicates whether a product is published or not. Initially, right after creation or import, products have an unpublished state. After explicitly publishing or saving changes to a product in Bizzkit PIM, it is given the published state.