Catalogues

In brief: In PIM, a catalogue is a selection of products for a specific purpose, such as a product range for a country, a customer, a channel or a season. The same item can appear in several catalogues with different structures.

Catalogues and product ranges

Catalogues largely correspond to product ranges. Companies create multiple catalogues in PIM, for example a B2B catalogue for specialist retailers, a B2C catalogue for their own online shop, customer-specific catalogues for key accounts and a print catalogue. Each catalogue has its own structure of categories and can use its own text, prices or images.

Electronic catalogues

In B2B, catalogues are often sent to customers and retailers as files, typically in BMEcat format, often with attributes based on ETIM or ECLASS. A PIM system generates these electronic catalogues automatically from the data maintained in the system. For printed catalogues, this is handled by Cross Media Publishing.

Example

A sanitary products manufacturer maintains 15.000 items. Its specialist retail catalogue contains all of them, its DIY retail catalogue contains 3.000 with consumer-friendly descriptions, and its catalogue for Switzerland contains only products approved for that market, with prices in Swiss francs. Each item is maintained just once.

See also

• Product categories
• Channels
• Cross Media Publishing
• Product data distribution
• Long Tail