What is managed content?
If your service offering includes us managing your content, you may see fields in the admin that you cannot edit.
What we'll cover in this Article
The frequency in which the content gets updated depends on the type of content and vendor. This may range from near-real time to a quarterly basis. You may opt-out of having individual products manged, however, this means that you are then responsible for maintaining the content yourself.
You can tell whether a product is managed by viewing it in the admin. In the image above, any fields that are grayed out indicate that particular data is imported based on the information we receive from the vendor.
The following data types may be managed by Logicblock:
Categories: Category names
Manufacturers: Manufacturer names
Products:
- Inventory: Quantity Available at vendor
- Status: Active / Inactive status
- Catalog: Product details such as name, descriptions, keywords, and attributes.
Wholesalers/Vendors
The following is a list of the wholesalers we are currently integrated with and that we offer catalog management services for.
- S.P. Richards (SPR)
- Essendant
- ORSNasco
- Educators Resources
- Supplies Network
- HON
- McKesson
- Arlington
- Box Partners
Managed Products
With products, you have the freedom of managing parts of a product (Inventory, Status, and Content) while leaving the other parts to be managed by the vendor.
This can be accomplished via spreadsheet. For more information on deactivating products, Click here.
Managed Product Status
The Status of a product dictates whether or not it will show up on your site's storefront. If a product is "Active" it will be visible on the storefront. If a product is "Inactive" it will not be visible on the storefront. You can quickly view the status of a product by going to the Products page in the admin Store Catalog > Products and looking at the "STATUS" column (Green - Active, Red - Inactive).
The Status for a managed product can be altered by uploading a spreadsheet containing columns "sku" and "status". Note that this change will be overwritten and restored to it's original setting after the monthly catalog update.
If you do not want the status of a product to be altered when the monthly catalog update runs, you will want to include a "managedstatus" column to your spreadsheet.
Managed Product Inventory
The inventory will be updated according the default Vendor selected for the individual product. If you select a vendor that is not part of a managed service, we will not update the inventory.
Managed inventory is typically updated on a daily basis from the vendors. The "Available" number is typically the global inventory number (across all distribution centers).
You can access the inventory of a product by clicking on "Inventory" which is located in the Product Menu of the product edit page.
By un-checking the "Enabled" option, this item will be excluded from being updated by the vendor data importers indefinitely, meaning Logicblock will not update that products inventory data.
Managed Product Content
The managed content, which includes product descriptions/images/attributes etc, can also be individually managed leaving just the Status and Inventory to be updated when the data importers are run.
Any areas that are not grayed out, such as custom keywords, descriptions etc, are not managed and thus any information you enter here will not be overwritten when we run the monthly catalog update.
For more information on adding your own content to managed products, Click here.
Incorrect Content
This catalog information is provided by the Wholesaler and we are at their mercy in terms of gathering that information.
Note: For issue(s) relating to erroneous/missing information with managed content, please contact your Vendor so that they can work on resolving them. Once they have resolved the issue(s), our monthly catalog management service will use the updated information for your site.
Managed Categories
Categories are created based on a products information. The best way to think about this process is that we have a product importer, not a category importer. When we run the managed catalog importer service, it generates a category for that product if it does not already exist. The following are actions that can occur during this process:
- If an item belongs to a certain category and you happen to delete/move/rename that category, when the monthly importer runs, that same category will be re-created.
- If your managed vendor has discontinued a particular category, our importers will not delete the existing category.
- If you moved a managed product to a different category, it will remain there but it will also be added back into the original category.
- Any categories that you create yourself will not be touched by the importer.
- Any custom products that you have in managed categories will not be touched.
Remember, our importers will never remove products from a category.
Primary Vendor Catalog
Your primary vendor, which is sometimes referred to as your "First Call" is the main vendor and is what decides how managed secondary and tertiary content is loaded onto your site. If for example you are wanting both vendors ABC and 123, you'll have to pick your primary vendor. The reason behind this is whichever vendor you decided on, is what categories schema will be created. Say you go with vendor ABC as your primary vendor, when we run the import, the category schema for ABC will be created.
Product creation when multiple managed vendors exist
When you want to add more than one vendor to your site, there are a number of things to consider. If the two or more vendors have overlapping data, there's a particular way that data is imported.
- If a product already exists, and belongs to a managed service catalog, it will be skipped (product is part of another managed service).
- If a product already exists, but does NOT belong to a managed service catalog, it will be overwritten with the updated information and become part of the managed service (products you have created manually will be updated and become managed).
Category Creation with multiple managed vendors:
- SPR + ESS (secondary categories not imported)
- ANYTHING + ORSNasco (secondary categories ARE imported) all placed under top heading "Industrial Supplies"
- ANYTHING + Educators Resources (secondary categories ARE imported) all placed under top heading "School Supplies"
- ANYTHING + Supplies Network (Supplies Network categories are OPTIONAL) all placed under top heading "Supplies"
Note: If you cancel a managed catalog service, ALL products that are part of this managed service will be deleted from the system.