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Core Concepts for Products

The product catalog is the core foundation of Endless, managing all product information that flows through the system. With over 100 potential attributes per product, it serves as the absolute source of truth for product data. The product catalog goes beyond basic product details to include comprehensive information like dimensional weights, commercial data, customs information, and specialized details for different sales channels. Endless enables users to answer any question about their products, with each unanswered query presenting an opportunity for data enrichment. The product catalog is fundamental to other modules, as products are central to operations like inventory management, order processing, and purchasing.

The goal of the Product catalog is to allow you to answer any question you are asked about your products. If you are asked a question that you can’t answer, it’s an opportunity to enrich your product data. That question is now answerable for all future queries. A “question” can also take the form of an API call from (or to) an external system like Amazon.

The Product Catalog is a critical part of Endless because it provides information needed by other modules, like inventory and orders, for their operation. Almost all operations in Endless are related to items in the catalog. For instance, inventory records and movements require information from the catalog to operate, orders are based on catalog items, and so on.

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Endless Commerce should be the absolute source of truth for your product data. Many systems and stakeholders will need a copy of your product data (your shopping cart, your 3PL, your accounting system, and so on).

The core object of the catalog is a product. Products is at the core of basically every team, system, process, and action of a CPG business. The atomic unit for a product is a SKU. The SKU should be a unique identifier within a given brand. This is a system requirement. Ideally, a SKU should be unique across all brands, but this is not a system requirement.

Products are related to other key parts of Endless as follows:

  • Orders are products being shipped to a customer
  • Inventory is the quantity of a product at a location
  • Advance Shipping Notices (ASNs) indicate how much of a product is in transit to a location
  • Purchase orders are amount of a product that has been bought from a supplier