This articles describes category and navigation milestones to design and manage changing storefronts.

Overview

Merchandisers need to update the storefront often to keep consumers coming back and shop for more. Updates are driven by multiple events such as special Sale days (for example, Black Friday), seasons (for example, Fall), product introductions (or product expirations), customer appreciation events, partner events, and many more. Marketing content and product-data driven content needs to be constantly refreshed in order to stay relevant in the shopper’s short attention span in today’s competitive environment. In order to design and manage such rapidly changing storefront experiences, Infosys Equinox Commerce’s Merchandising microservice provides merchandisers the ability to define milestones for categories and navigation to manage these rapid changes.

The merchandiser and the merchandising manager can access the milestones within a project by clicking on the “Details” and then the “Milestones” tab:

A milestone is a time period with a start time and an end time for which the category or the navigation is designed and managed. Merchandisers manage the category or the navigation for a specific milestone and each category (or navigation) may have multiple milestones with varying start times and end times. The merchandiser may choose to boost and highlight different products within the same category during different milestones to create a different shopping experience. Similarly, the site navigation can have different milestones thereby providing a different navigational experience at different times from the storefront. Category and Navigation milestones together define the shopper’s storefront experience at any given time. Note:

Milestone Details

Milestones are available for each category and for site navigation, separate from one another. As with all other Infosys Equinox entities, milestones are subject to project-based approval workflow and only approved milestones become effective at their respective start times. A milestone may be edited at any time, but only limited data can be edited once the milestone has begun. For instance, the milestone’s end time can be adjusted after the milestone has started, but not its start time. Similar to other entities, milestones are editable collaboratively by all merchandisers who have been provided such privileges. For added flexibility, milestones are assigned a priority – low, medium, or high. When multiple milestones are scheduled during the same time period, the highest priority milestone will be used by the Merchandising service. In case there are multiple milestones with the same high priority, then the milestone that was approved last will be used. For ideal operation, there should be an “Evergreen” milestone which is a long duration milestone and there can be special milestones such as “Black Friday” that override the “Evergreen” milestone for short periods like a few days or a week. The milestones should be seamlessly stitched in time so that as one milestone expires, the other milestone takes over.

Milestone API Endpoints

A comprehensive set of API (Application Programming Interface) endpoints for milestones enables merchandisers to perform all the create, edit, manage, or update functions required to administer the milestones. The API endpoints are also complemented by a rich GUI (Graphical User Interface) for quick and easy management.
Sl. # API Endpoint API Title
1. GET /projects/{projectId}/categories/{categoryId}/milestones Get a Milestone by Category ID
2. GET /projects/{projectId}/milestones Find All Milestones
3. POST /projects/{projectId}/milestones Create a Milestone
4. GET /projects/{projectId}/milestones/{milestoneId} Get a Milestone by ID
5. PUT /projects/{projectId}/milestones/{milestoneId} Update a Milestone
6. DELETE /projects/{projectId}/milestones/{milestoneId} Delete a Milestone
7. PATCH /projects/{projectId}/milestones/{milestoneId} Update All or Required Fields in a Milestone
For additional information on the application programming interface (API) endpoints, refer to the developer portal: Merchandising API Endpoints/

Interactive Timeline Display of Milestones

In order to manage multiple milestones efficiently, the interactive display of milestones for each Project has two swimlanes – the upper “Live” showing all the approved milestones and the bottom “In Process” showing all the milestones in that particular project for that category or navigation.

The interactive features are as follows:

  • Pan – Timelines can be panned left and right to view any time period.
  • Zoom – A timeline’s scale can be adjusted by clicking on the time period buttons (when configured in the collection properties), for example, 3 months, 6 months, etc. AND users can zoom in/zoom out by simply pinching on the display.
  • A vertical blue line indicates the current time/day.
  • The top horizontal bar shows the net result of the computation of all priorities of the different milestones and reflects the exact milestone that will be presented to the shoppers.
  • Clicking on “Live” or “In Process” swimlanes, the different milestones with their priorities that are approved or in process within the current project will be shown.
  • All in-process milestones are filled with a dashed pattern to differentiate them from the approved ones which are solid.
  • Clicking on any milestone provides a quick menu to Edit, Clone, or Preview the milestone.
  • Clone – The milestone details are duplicated for the convenience of the editor so that minor changes can be easily accomplished without having to recreate the entire milestone from scratch.
  • When multiple milestones are available, they are all shown on this display grouped in their respective priorities.

Category Milestones

Merchandisers define the products that will be included in a category and the way these products will be presented in a category milestone. While in Edit mode, the product selector places the selected products in the template, and then the merchandiser can drag, drop, and anchor the different products in any desired position within the template. The template may also facilitate the selection and positioning of the filters that are to be used with this category. An example of a category milestone is shown below:

The API response for a category milestone includes:

  • Category ID
  • Template ID to be used for that category
  • An array of all the products in the category (uxData)
  • List of creatives added in the template
  • Sort order for the products in the category
  • An array of products that are specially boosted in that category
 An example of a category milestone response is shown below:

Navigation Milestones

As categories are built by the respective merchandisers for those categories, the merchandising leads or managers can create the site navigation by arranging the approved categories in a tree layout with branches and sub-branches. Similar to categories, the site navigation has its own milestones. In addition to the ID, name, start date, end date, priority, and status, the most important element of the navigation milestone is the interactive tree layout. The interactive tree layout features the following:
  • A combined list/tree view to show all the categories that are added to the tree as well as the ones that are yet to be added.
  • Ability to open/close all branches of the tree.
  • Ability to hide categories that are approved but disabled from the site navigation. (for example, some merchandisers may want to hide their categories from navigation but have special promotional email to market those categories to special customers).
  • Ability to show changes that are performed by the merchandiser during the current session.
  • Ability to enable/disable any category from the tree.
  • Ability to clone a category for the purpose of having the category shown in multiple branches in the site navigation.
  • Ability to drag and drop any category anywhere in the tree.
  • Ability to get additional details about a category.

Below is an example of the navigation milestone showing the interactive tree layout:

The API response for a navigation milestone adds an array of the children (categories) to the data available in the category milestone response. An example of the navigation milestone API response is shown below:

Creatives

Creatives are digital assets (images/video) added by the merchandisers to the product list page for promotional purposes. Creatives are generally created from pre-defined widgets, and then saved to the Asset Library. Creatives do not have their own milestones since creatives become part of the category milestone when the merchandiser places the specific creative onto the template while building the category. An example of a Creative being built from a Hero Widget is shown below:

Milestones and Projects

As is the case with all other authored entities, milestones also are subject to project-based approval workflow in Infosys Equinox. The merchandiser and the merchandising manager can access the milestones within a project by clicking on the “Milestones” tab inside the project. A project may include categories, creatives, and milestones and a single approval will approve all the items within a project. The notes section of the project includes system-generated notes as well as user-entered notes and can be used for auditing purposes.




Revision History
2022-04-10 | JP – Fixed link and http issues.
2020-03-27 | JP – Minor edits.
2019-11-20 | JP – Uploaded the content.
2019-06-03 | PLK – Page added.