Site-Specific Product Attributes
Products are defined at an organization-level and can be shared across multiple catalogs and sites.
All product attributes (except price, inventory, and active data) are shared across all sites. While this is useful for most product attributes (mainly the localizable presentation attributes), some attributes, such as online, searchable, sitemap and custom-defined attributes, must be managed per site.
A site-specific product attribute can have a default value that is shared across all sites and a value per site that overrides the default value. A site-specific value is typically an exception. For example, 14 out of 15 sites share the same value, while one site must override this value. Only non-localizable attributes can be site-specific.
The following system-defined product attributes, not included in the quota, are defined as site-specific:
| Attributes | Site-specific usage |
|---|---|
| online, onlineFrom, and onlineTo | Use this to control if a product is visible (accessible) in the storefront. The online schedule for the same product might be different for different sites. For example, a merchant wants to launch and sell iPhone in May in the US, and in July in Germany. The merchant can use the onlineFrom and onlineTo values to implement this. Also, the merchant doesn't want some product variation colors to be available in a country-specific site. The merchant can exclude these variation products from the site by setting them to offline. |
| searchable | Use this to control whether or not a product is included in the search index. Often, the searchable status is calculated based on other site-specific data, such as availability or active data. |
| searchRank, searchPlacement | Use these for site-specific sorting rules. |
| siteMapIncluded, siteMapChangeFrequency and siteMapPriority | Use these to control which products, and how products are included in the site map file that is provided to search engines. For example, a product might be included in the site map on a Site A, but not included on Site B. |
You can configure both system-defined and custom site-specific product attribute values in the Business Manager Products and Catalogs module. See Edit Product Details to learn how to do this.
You can configure both system-defined and custom site-specific product attribute values in the Business Manager Products and Catalogs module. See Add, Modify, and Edit Products Manually to learn how to do this.
Site-Specific vs. Localizable
Site-specific attributes are similar to localizable attributes:
- You can manage site-specific values explicitly via Business Manager and import them in a way similar to how we manage locale-specific values.
- You can manage site-specific values implicitly via our API, in a way similar to how we implicitly set a localized value for the current request locale.
- Site-specific values remain transparent at the API level, in a way similar to how locale-specific values remain transparent via language fallbacks.
- Site-specific values are owned by the product (rather than the site), in a way similar to how locale-specific values are owned by the product (rather than the site using the locale).
- Site-specific values have a different lifecycle than plain attributes, in a way similar to how localized values often have a different lifecycle than the non-localized values.
The difference between localized and site-specific attributes is that they use different fallback rules when resolving values. Site-specific values use fallback rules encoded in the organization structure (such as site value > default(global) value), while localized values use fallback rules encoded within the locale identifier itself (language_territory > language > default).
Site-specific Variation or ProductOption attributes
Site-specific product attributes aren’t supported as VariationAttribute or ProductOption attributes. Business Manager filters site-specific attributes, so that you can't select attribute definitions in the context of variation attributes or product options. Catalog import logs a data warning if you try to import VariationAttributes or ProductOptions based on a site-specific attribute.
Staging Site-Specific Product Attributes
Site-specific attribute values are automatically staged with all other product attribute values.