Catalogs

Catalog is the centralized service and merchandising layer for managing products, categories, and items Commerce+. Its primary purpose is to let business teams structure catalog data once, tailor it for specific channels, and make that data reliably available to storefronts and other product business capabilities.

Benefits

Catalog management enables business users to create tailored catalogs for digital channels without changing core product data.

Channel-specific merchandising without changing the base catalog: Create tailored catalogs, modify hierarchies, and apply channel-level overrides while preserving the original base catalog and structure.
Efficient catalog operations: Import catalog data from Product Information Management (PIM) tools or external systems through shared APIs to eliminate duplicate integration work.
Enhanced business control: Customize product names, descriptions, product relationships, and assigned digital assets for each channel to increase discoverability and customer conversion rates.

Data flow

Catalog starts with importing or synchronizing source data into the catalog service, then business users create and manage merchandised catalogs to apply channel-specific hierarchy and product changes. The resulting catalog data is exposed through shared APIs and browsing experiences for storefront and other Commerce+ capabilities.

Solving business challenges with catalogs

This guide maps high-level business requirements to catalog configuration capabilities, operational tasks, and systemic data flow logic.


Business objective	Recommended capability	Operational task	Data flow logic
Localize catalog experiences by channel or market	Merchandised catalog creation and hierarchy management	Create a merchandised catalog Select the base catalog Reorder categories and products for the channel	Initialize a merchandised catalog overlay from the base catalog, and apply channel-specific hierarchy rules to manage product visibility.
Tailor product content for regional or channel needs	Product field overrides and digital assets	Override product display names and descriptions Add digital assets Maintain inherited base catalog content	The system applies base catalog data by default. Channel-specific values overwrite default data when you add explicit overrides or new digital assets.
Support cross-system catalog consumption at scale	Catalog import services and runtime and admin APIs	Import data from product information management systems Synchronize updates into catalog service Expose catalog data to channels by assigning base catalogs to one or more channels	Catalog service loads or synchronizes source data, flattens the dataset to optimize performance, and serves the data to storefronts through shared graph-based access patterns.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:

Permission level: Catalog administrator or system administrator with access to catalog configuration and channel management. For more information, see Identity Service: create users and assign permissions.
System requirements: Commerce+ environment with catalog service, GraphQL integration, and either a PIM or an external import source
Data needed: Base catalog, product and category data, channel definitions, and parent organization or access-control information where required

Technical details

Catalog technical architecture

Catalog provides data import services, runtime and admin APIs, and workspace-managed merchandising tools to implement channel-specific catalog overlays.

Core architectural components

Import services to load data from PIM or external infrastructure
Runtime and admin APIs to serve catalog, category, product, item, and attribute information
Workspace-enabled merchandising tools for channel-specific overlays

Implementation frameworks

GraphQL admin APIs for merchandised catalog tooling and other Commerce+ PBCs
GraphQL runtime APIs for storefronts and other Commerce+ PBCs
Flattened catalog data structures that optimize query performance
Workspace-aware frameworks for channel-specific merchandising modifications