You can integrate Optimizely PIM with B2C Commerce Cloud to manage all aspects of 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 B2C 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 B2C classes to 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 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 B2C Commerce – PIM and B2C 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. B2C Commerce has more information in their property types than PIM, which you should import into 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 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 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 PIM by importing data from your ERP, suppliers or other data sources and feeds. You should also organize and import digital assets like product images, manuals, regulatory disclosures and other documents that customers may need. You should also import translations, related products and product category assignments as needed.  

Once everything is imported into PIM, you can begin publishing products into B2C. 

Step 4: Maintain your data

After you have integrated B2C Commerce and PIM, you should continue to maintain your product information, assets and assignments.

1. Maintain your product information – You should keep your product information updated 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 B2C 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.