Virtual Catalog Implementation / Management Via API

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We are looking into the usage of Virtual Catalogs to achieve the ability to place products within more than one product category and to provide special categories for popular products, new products, etc.

We need some guidance on the proper management of the Virtual Catalog vs Physical Catalog via API and best-practice in implementing this feature.

Some questions include:

  1. Do we need to maintain the product category taxonomy within the physical catalog?
    a. Alternative would be to just place the products in the physical catalog and place the taxonomy only on the virtual catalog linking products accordingly to reduce the repetitive work of maintaining both category structures.
  2. How do you associate/un-associate and manage the relationships between the physical catalog/product and the virtual catalog/product via API?
2

Hi

Could you provide more details about of projects, catalog size, who will be responsible for catalog management?

First, review this post Catalog - Overview - User Guides (virtocommerce.org)

Second, yes, we recommend maintaining the product category taxonomy within the physical catalog to simplify management, maintenance and scaling as well. You can look on google category structure Google product category [google_product_category] - Google Merchant Center Help.

Category taxonomy within the virtual catalog are primary for storefront and SEO.

Third, open Virto Commerce Back Office, sigin and navigate /docs to open swagger UI.
Developer guide - Swagger/OpenApi - Virto Commerce Documentation

Here you can find VirtoCommerce.Catalog module Rest API. For example, /api/catalog/listentrylinks can be used to relationships between the physical catalog/product and the virtual catalog/product.

Virto Commerce Back Office is SPA, so, you can open network tab in browser, run command and find API.

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Hello Oleg

This is Aaron with Ntara. Since this is a public form i can only share limited information, however this is a project we have worked on together in the past. The Virto Catalog is fully managed by an external PIM that interfaces to Virto via API to maintain synchronization of all the category, hierarchy, product/variants, etc.

Perhaps 4k products with 25k variants.

Hopefully this helps. I will check out the documentation you have referenced.

Cheers,
Aaron Jestrab

4

Hi Aaron.

Please submit extra data to Virto Commhttps://www.virtocommerce.org/t/virtual-catalog-implementation-management-via-api/532/2erce Helpdesk

5

Hello Oleg, sorry for the late response and gap in communication. It has been quite busy.

Catalog size ~ 4000 products / 30,000 variants

We manage these catalogs from an external PIM (InRiver) which is fully integrated managing all catalog related functionality (property creation, category management, product/variant creation updates, etc.

The plan is to have the InRiver PIM push the “Physical Catalog” with one existence of each product as is does today related to a specific category in a 1:1 relationship.

The Virtual catalog will also be pushed from the InRiver PIM and associations created as required: