This page gives an overview of the Merchandising microservice, including core features, for the Infosys Equinox platform.

Overview

The Merchandising microservice (“Merchandising”) provides Merchandisers and Merchandising Managers the ability to create and manage the presentation of products to the storefront. Merchandisers can create and manage the product taxonomy using static and dynamic (rule-based) categories and visually build the product list pages, product detail pages, category landing pages, site navigation, and other digital experiences using Merchandising. The graphical drag-and-drop feature enables the Merchandisers to easily place and move products and marketing creatives on a product page template. The templates are agnostic to the frontend technology utilized and are easily attached to the microservice for the Merchandisers to use. Merchandising also features a live timeline display of the planned experiences (also known as milestones) to enable the Merchandisers to quickly and easily view and manage the multitude of rapidly changing experiences to meet the business’ merchandising needs.

Similar to all other Infosys Equinox microservices, Merchandising is associated with a specific store that will also have an association with a specific catalog. Merchandising works with the catalog specified in the store and presents the products from that catalog to enable the merchandiser to visually build out the digital experiences, which are then approved by a Merchandiser Manager using a project-based approval workflow.

See the Merchandising glossary for definitions of some key Merchandising microservice terms.

Core Features

  • Easily create and manage taxonomy of products
  • Supports multiple categories including static and dynamic (rule-based) categories.
  • Live timeline display of the planned experiences for each different time period (a.k.a milestones) to enable
  • Merchandisers to quickly and easily view and manage the multitude of rapidly changing experiences to meet the merchandising needs
  • Highly interactive Timeline display for Category and Site Navigation milestones to enable users to click on any milestone in the timeline to preview/edit the milestone. The timeline display provides zoom, pan, compact view, expanded view as well as a quick view on click.
  • Supports creation and management of Site Navigation using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to place and move categories in a tree view.
  • Supports multiple locales (language and geography).
  • Provides a project-based workflow approval with an audit trail for each entity such as Milestone, Category, Site Navigation.
  • Configurable sort order of products in each category per milestone
  • Default sort order setting for all categories
  • Supports Business-to-Consumer (B2C) as well as Business-to-Business (B2B).
  • Ability to set a default sort order for all categories.
  • Supports Visual Merchandising enabling the merchandiser to place/move products and marketing creatives within a PLP defined by the user-selected template.
  • Supports widgets that can be populated with digital assets to build creatives.
  • Supports multiple milestones for categories, product groups, search override, and site navigation to author digital experiences that are different for different events/time.
  • Supports roles and permissions.
  • Ability to maintain the sequence of categories within the site-navigation milestones.
  • Ability to map the products to a category milestone based on a “keyword”. The products which have this keyword for any of its attributes will be mapped to the category milestone.
  • Ability to add a category to more than one category within the site navigation and rename the same if required (Alias Category).
  • Ability to download a customized sample sheet for a merchandising collection along with the “guidelines” sheet.
  • Provides flexible category, category attribute, category milestone, navigation milestone, and category alias name enrichment and content management in multiple locales (language, geography) to enable e-commerce in multiple geographies.
  • Ability to define a search term, create one or more milestones for a search override, override the search results for a search term, and assign products and a template within a milestone.
  • Ability to define a product group, create one or more milestones for a product group, and assign products and PDP template to the products within a group.
  • Ability to configure SEO details for a category.
  • Ability to view the Import Summary report.
  • Ability to import and export merchandising details.
  • Ability to download and view the failed items with the reason for import failure.
  • Ability to skip or consume project approval workflow in the Merchandising console.
  • Ability to create asset libraries where merchandisers can build their own creatives that can be assigned to a category.
  • Automatic multi-locale support for category name and description (via AI app). (New!)


Revision History
2024-11-15 | JP – Updated the core features section for 8.18.8 release.
2022-11-02 | AN – Updated the core features section for 8.15.4 release.
2022-01-03 | JP – Updated the core features section for 8.11.0 release.
2020-09-28 | AN – Updated the Core Features section.
2020-01-31| AM- Updated content for February 2020 release.
2019-11-01 | JP – Updated content for November 2019 release.
2019-10-03 | JP – Minor copyedits.
2019-09-17 | JP – Updated content for September 2019 release.
2019-07-12 | AN – Content updated for July 2019 release.
2019-04-26 | MA – Content updated for April 2019 release.
2019-01-23 | PLK – Content uploaded.