Implement Optimizely PIM and Customized Commerce

  • Updated

You can integrate Optimizely Product Information Management (PIM) with Customized Commerce to manage your e-commerce data. There are some common patterns and best practices that can help you with this integration, but you can customize to fit your needs. 

The basic process involves: 

  • Designing, configuring, and loading data.  
  • Publishing data to a sandbox site prior to your launch.
  • Maintaining the catalog and publishing changes after your site is live.

Step 1: Design your data

Start with designing your data. Consider how you want your Product Detail pages to look on your Customized Commerce website. What information should show for each product? How do you want customers to browse or search for products? What product images or other assets do you want to include? 

Planning saves time and effort during your implementation. For example, you can match your Customized Commerce classes to the PIM's product templates to reduce challenges when syncing products.  

Step 2: Configure the integration

Next, configure both systems to work together. 

  1. Organize your team – Understand the PIM's roles and permissions, then configure your workflow and the property for assignments. Finally, add team members and assign them to the appropriate products and roles. 
  2. Sync properties from Customized Commerce – The PIM and Customized Commerce use properties to structure and define the product data model in the catalog and storefront. Properties include data elements that define your products for internal purposes, like shipping weight, or external purposes, like attributes visible to a customer on your site. The sync will also pull over product relationship types, product classes, and languages. Customized Commerce has more information in their property types, which you should import into the PIM through an initial sync. 
  3. Create product templates – After you have defined your properties and property groups, create templates that match your product lines. Product templates define the properties used by similar products together in the PIM, such as shoes, shirts, and clothing accessories. Templates also enforce data governance and support auditing for incomplete products using properties designated as required or recommended. 
  4. Define your taxonomy– Create categories for your customers to browse.  
  5. Configure Settings – Finally, configure system settings to customize your experience in the PIM. For example, you can configure whether products require content for multiple languages to publish. 

Step 3: Load and publish your data

You can create product records in the PIM by importing spreadsheet data from your ERP, suppliers, or other data sources and feeds. You should organize and import digital assets like product images, manuals, regulatory disclosures, and other documents that customers may need. You should also import any translations, related products, and product category assignments.  

Once everything is imported into the PIM, you can begin publishing products into Customized Commerce. 

Step 4: Maintain your data

After you have integrated the PIM and Customized Commerce, you should continue to maintain your product information, assets and assignments.

  1. Maintain your product information – You should keep your product information updated in the PIM. You can search and filter for products you have been assigned to find products to update, edit multiple products directly in the results grid, or select a product to edit in the product detail view. When your product data is 100% complete, you can approve and publish them to your Customized Commerce websites. 
  2. Use collections to find products – Use collections to easily identify different sets of products that have information gaps. 
  3. Create product variants – Product variants allow you to group variations of a product, such as different sizes or colors. Product variants require a separate product for each variation (the child product) and group them together under a parent product.
  4. Use the dashboard and reports – The PIM dashboard provides an overview of your product data. You can use the product dashboard to view an overview of your product data, with links pinned collections and products by status. 

Step 5: Publish changes

Continue to update and publish your product information as needed. Your publishing process follows the workflow for review and approval you established during configuration. You can learn more about a similar process here.