Acquia Commerce Manager terminology and fields¶

Acquia Commerce Manager operates by using the same principles that are used by other commerce platforms. This documentation page describes the terminology you will encounter, and where you can find that related data in Acquia Commerce Manager.

For information about changing some of the specific configurations, see Acquia Commerce Manager configuration settings.

Products, SKUs, and Product Options¶

Products are stored as Drupal nodes using the Product content type. As nodes, these products often relate to single pages in your Drupal website, and are imported from your commerce solution.

A single product will relate to one or more SKUs or product variants. These are non-node entities in Drupal and contain information about a product, including the display price and product images. SKUs are related to Product Options, such as t-shirt size, and are stored as taxonomy terms in a Drupal taxonomy vocabulary called Product Options.

To display details about products, sign in to your Drupal website as an administrator, and then complete the following steps, based on the information you want to review:

Products – In the admin menu, click Content.
SKUs – Go to Commerce > SKUs.
Product Options – Go to Structure > Taxonomy > SKU Product Option.

Product fields¶

The Product content type contains several default fields used for integration with your commerce solution, including the following:

Title – Product title
Marketing Text – Customer-facing body content
Category – Product categories
SKUs – One or more SKUs related to the product (not an entity reference field)

You can add additional fields to the product content type as needed for your website.

To determine the stock availability of a product, Drupal needs to make a call your commerce platform. This is then cached locally by Drupal for each individual SKU, using Drupal’s cache mechanism (which relies on Memcache). The cache lifetime in Drupal is proportional to the number of items in stock — the more items there are, the longer the cache lifetime. The multiplication factor is a configured element. In the case of 0 items in stock, the cache lifetime is the same as when there is 1 item in stock.

SKU fields¶

Product SKUs are used to uniquely identify your products, and are imported from your commerce solution.

SKU – SKU ID
Name – Name of the product variant
Image – Image for the product variant
Display Price – Price displayed to the customer, often the MSRP or similar. The actual price (Final price) will be stored in the Drupal database separately and synchronized through the Commerce Connector Service. When displaying a product, a product with a discounted price will often show the higher display price (such as $15) along with the current price (such as $10). The Final Price cannot be edited from the Drupal user interface.
Media – Raw output from the commerce backend that is processed into a Drupal image

You can display additional fields from the form configuration user interface.

Product option fields¶

Product options are defined in your commerce solution, and are synchronized with Drupal.

Name – Displayed option used on the product page
Description – Description of the product
Attribute ID – An ID for product attributes
Attribute Code – Product’s attribute code
Attribute Option ID – Attribute’s unique option ID

Product categories¶

Product categories are stored as a Taxonomy Vocabulary Product Category. This vocabulary supports a hierarchy.

Name – Displayed category name