Options and Parent Child Products
The PIM allows for the creation, management and publication of complex product structures. Each system refers to these structures differently. Jasper PIM refers to them as parent and child products. Optimize your customers' shopping experience by organizing your products using Options in the PIM.
What are Parent Child Products?
When you are shopping for an item and you land on a page with product information, for example a t-shirt. The page displays the information about the shirt and you need to select a size and then a color prior to adding it to your cart. The t-shirt is the parent product, each color and size is an option, and the resulting combinations of size and color (Large, Red) are child products.
What are Options and Option Sets?
Similar to how Attributes and Attribute Sets are organized in the PIM, Options and Option Sets are used to create the pivotal relationship for parent child products. Options are handled as specialty select box attributes. Option sets are the assignable option groupings.
In our t-shirt example there are two options: size and color. For size, we may have option values of S, M, and L and for color red, green, blue, and black. The option set could appropriately be named Size/Color.
What can I do with options and option sets?
Store all of your similar option values under a single option in the PIM. There is no need to create unique options/sets for products as the PIM will only publish the SKUs associated with a parent and not all potential option values. This removes a common limitation from some e-commerce platforms.
You can create option sets using combinations of multiple options to more fully represent your product organizational structure inside the PIM. Assigning an option set to a product will convert it to a parent and allow you to create or assign children.
What are the differences between Parent, Child, and Single Products?
You can think of single products as parents without an option set. Functionally they are very much the same in most respects. Each will publish out as a wholly represented product from the PIM with all available attributes, assets, pricing, description, etc.
A parent product is a single product with an option set assigned to it. A children tab will appear and allow the creation of new children or the use of existing products as children.
A child product is a complete product in the PIM that has been assigned an option value or values and has been related to a parent product using these values. Each parent and each child are treated as complete products in the PIM. Children can have unique assets, pricing, inventory, description, etc. When publishing, data is inherited from the parent if not present on the child.