Overview
The PIM Service is the central product-information system of the Equinox commerce platform. It owns the master data used to describe everything a storefront sells: products and their SKUs (variants), attributes and attribute groups, categories and navigation menus, catalogs, digital assets (images/files), prices (price lists, price facets, pricing rules), and product composition types (bundles, fixed bundles, kits, collections). It is multi-tenant: almost every operation is scoped by an instanceId (a tenant) passed as a query parameter, and most reads/writes are additionally scoped by a catalogId.
Beyond CRUD, the service provides a workflow/versioning layer (DRAFT → LIVE with scheduled versions and rollback), a search-indexing pipeline that pushes catalog data into Typesense or Elasticsearch, storefront-facing “Action” APIs that serve enriched product/category data, and bulk import/export driven by AWS Step Functions and the Equinox batch framework. It also supports per-tenant extensibility via a plugin registry and a marketplace-connector host.
Business value
| Capability | Business outcome |
|---|---|
| Centralized product & SKU master data | One source of truth for catalog data across all channels |
| Multi-tenant instances | A single deployment serves many brands/tenants in isolation |
| Attributes & attribute groups | Flexible, configurable product data models per tenant |
| Categories & navigation | Merchandising hierarchies and storefront menus |
| Prices, price lists, price facets & rules | Region/currency/segment-aware pricing and rule-based promotions |
| Bundles, fixed bundles, kits, collections | Composite/grouped product selling |
| Workflow & versioning (DRAFT/LIVE/SCHEDULED) | Safe editing, approvals, scheduled publishing and rollback |
| Search indexing (Typesense / Elasticsearch) | Fast storefront search, faceting and suggestions |
| Storefront “Action” APIs | Enriched, read-optimized product/category delivery to shoppers |
| Bulk import / export | Onboarding and mass maintenance of large catalogs |
| Digital assets (S3) | Managed product imagery and documents |
| Extensions & marketplace connectors | Per-tenant customization without forking the service |
Who uses it
| Persona | How they interact |
|---|---|
| Catalog / merchandising manager | Creates and edits products, SKUs, categories, prices via the admin UI / write APIs |
| Platform / tenant administrator | Provisions instances and configures instance properties (locales, search engine, plugins) |
| Storefront / web application | Calls the unauthenticated Action and Search APIs to render catalog and search results |
| Downstream services (Inventory, Rating, OMS) | Consume product/price data and referenced service integrations |
| Data-integration engineer | Runs bulk import/export jobs (Step Functions) to load or extract catalogs |
| Extension / connector developer | Ships per-tenant validators (plugin registry) or marketplace connectors |
Related resources
- Step Functions definitions for import, export, indexing and clone pipelines
- EventBridge rules and infrastructure wiring
- A bundled admin front-end for catalog management
- Interactive API docs (Swagger UI) at
/documentationwhen the service is running
Core Features
| # | Feature | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product & SKU management | Full CRUD, attribute/category/asset association, bulk operations |
| 2 | Attribute model | Attributes and attribute groups with data types, options, validation rules, model references |
| 3 | Categories & navigation | Category hierarchy and navigation-menu management with bulk endpoints |
| 4 | Catalogs | Catalog containers organizing products (master + additional catalogs) |
| 5 | Pricing | Price lists, prices, and price facets |
| 6 | Composite products | Bundles, fixed bundles, SKU kits, fixed kits, collections |
| 7 | Digital assets | Upload/manage assets, S3-backed, presigned URLs |
| 8 | Search indexing | Event-driven indexing into Typesense/Elasticsearch, per-instance collections |
| 9 | Storefront Action APIs | Read-optimized enriched product/category/search/suggestion endpoints |
| 10 | Bulk import / export | Step Functions + batch framework driven CSV/data pipelines |
| 11 | Multi-tenancy | instanceId-scoped data and per-instance configuration properties |
| 12 | Extensibility | Plugin-registry validators and marketplace-connector host integration |
| 13 | Internationalization | Per-locale attribute values and localized error messages |
Revision History
2026-08-04 | JP – Created the page and added the content.