The Perficient Sitecore team has been writing feverishly over the past few months to publish several new guides. Most recently, Mark Servais, a Sr. Technical Consultant within Perficient’s Sitecore practice and Sitecore MVP, authored a new paper, Four Ways to Successfully Integrate Your Product Catalog with Sitecore.
Sitecore is a content management platform that is very flexible in terms of its ability to integrate data and extend functionality. This guide explains several different approaches and best practices to integrating products into Sitecore, depending on your product catalog scenario. Of course, every integration is going to be unique in that each company has distinct practices, with diverse systems housing the product data, and various criteria surrounding the interaction with that data. Mark points out that you’ll want to take sales, pricing, attributes, and regional offerings into account as applicable.
Common scenarios include:
- The product catalog exists in Sitecore exclusively for the enterprise
- The product catalog exists outside of Sitecore and is managed outside of Sitecore
- The product catalog exists outside of Sitecore and is managed in multiple systems including Sitecore
- The product catalog exists outside of Sitecore and is managed in Sitecore
Mark goes into detail on each of the four ways, providing potential advantages and disadvantages depending on the scenario. He closes by recommending the use of a custom data provider to gain the most control and functionality, yet provides options if you are unable to do so. He also stresses the importance of data concurrency and consistency when thinking about how your content editors will interact with the product data.
You can download the full guide here.
And if you missed the other Sitecore guides, you can find them below:
