Creating Clarity’s Commerce Content
Although they are not yet a B2C enterprise, Clarity wants to leverage some of the capabilities available through Liferay Commerce to create product-specific content. While it is feasible to build Clarity’s product material using web content structures, Liferay’s commerce features provide an additional layer of future-proofing to the website. In this section, we’ll cover the following commerce features:
- Catalogs
- Products
- Channels
Catalogs
A catalog is a group of related products. Liferay catalogs provide a highly flexible way to organize your product offerings in the most sensible way for your business. There is no limit to the number of catalogs you can create, although maintenance effort should be a factor in how many you choose to have. Catalogs also allow you to define permissions for the products they contain, so that different product teams can manage different product groupings.
In addition, catalogs capture important commerce attributes like language, currency, and price lists, along with a placeholder image for products without an associated image. As useful as catalogs are, they are just empty containers without the products to populate them. Let’s take a look at products next.
Products
Like any manufacturer, Clarity has variants of their products designed to achieve different goals and target different customer profiles. Liferay Commerce supports four product types out of the box:
Simple Product
Any physical product for which inventory is tracked.
Virtual Product
Any non-tangible product, such as music files, electronic publications, services, and warranties.
Grouped Product
Two or more products from a Catalog that are packaged together and sold as a single item. Grouped products are tracked in your inventory and can contain simple products, virtual products, or other grouped products.
Shop by Diagram
Component parts belonging to a Bill of Materials (BOM) diagram that references products in the store.
Products offer more than just a predefined type of content–they offer many additional features that together create a first-class commerce experience with minimal effort:
- Product details
- Product options
- Units of measure
- Configurable products
- Product media (images, videos, etc.)
- Related products
- Downloadable product documents
- Product availability
- Product variants
While Clarity could model all of these product types and attributes with web content structures, Liferay commerce provides an intuitive solution that you can implement with ease.
Channels
Once their products and catalogs are configured, Clarity needs to think about how they will display their products to customer and website visitors. Channels are the storefront where products are displayed and sold to customers. They come with several useful features:
Store administrators can create multiple channels, each representing a different customer experience (B2B, B2C, B2X)
Channels can be linked to Liferay sites
You can use Liferay’s headless APIs to creative native mobile applications with channels or integrate channels with external marketplaces
Channels define default display languages and currencies, as well as default product display pages and category pages
For transactional sites, channels offer payment, shipping, and tax information
While e-commerce isn’t Clarity’s main focus right now, setting up these features will set them up for success in the future.
Exercises Coming Soon!
Conclusion
This concludes Creating Clarity’s Commerce Content.
Next Up: Organizing Clarity’s Content