Discover Product Attributes
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the purpose of Industries product attributes.
- Summarize the process for setting up product attributes.
Product Attributes
Sit back for a moment and think of something you bought recently. It might be a T-shirt, a fancy juicer, or garden shears. Were there any particular qualities that made the item you purchased more appealing than other products?
Attributes play an important role in the sales experience as they define the essence of a product or service. Attributes can be tangible, such as size, color, and weight, or intangible, such as subscription type, data plan, or stock keeping unit (SKU). Products can be with or without attributes. Those without attributes only have one form, such as a computer cord that only comes in one color.
Use these flashcards to explore examples of how different industries use product attributes.
Product attributes serve a number of purposes across Industries CPQ.
- In Shared Catalog, product designers use attributes as metadata building blocks to compose object types and products.
- In CPQ Cart, attributes communicate details of a product to customers, allow changes to certain aspects of a product, and can even control a product’s price when using attribute-based rules.
- In Industries Order Management, fulfillment specialists use attributes to map commercial products to technical products so that the customer has everything they need to use the product.
Here, we see the configuration window for a smartphone commercial product in the Cart.
In the example, the design-time attributes such as Brand, Capacity, and Mobile OS, are grayed out because their values are set behind the scenes. The Payment Type and Color attributes have connected picklists so the customer or sales rep can choose their values. Also, notice that the attributes appear after a Mobile Devices header. This is the name of the attribute category that stores these attributes. You learn more about attribute categories in a moment.
Attribute Setup in Product Designer
In Product Designer, you create attributes and then assign them to object types. When you apply the object type to a product, the product inherits the layout of fields and attributes from the object type. If you want to allow customers or sales reps to choose the values for an attribute in the Cart, create a picklist before creating the attribute, and then connect it to the attribute.
Attribute Definition
Attributes in Product Designer are key-value pairs. Depending on how you configure the attribute, its value is set at design-time, at runtime, or during order decomposition. To ensure accuracy and consistency in orders, you must populate the product’s attribute with the necessary values to complete the request.
Attribute vs. Field
What’s the difference between fields and attributes in Shared Catalog? Both can store specific information about a product, so when do you use each? Well, here are some recommendations.
- If the data element is common across all products in the catalog, such as the product’s name, ID, or description, you create a field. You need Salesforce administrator privileges to create fields.
- If the data element is specific to a particular product or class of product, which is most often the case, you create an attribute to store this information. You only need access to Product Designer to create attributes.
Attribute Category
In Shared Catalog, an attribute category holds a group of related attributes. In the Cart, these category names appear as headings in the product configuration window and organize different types of attributes into sections. Each attribute you create must correspond to an attribute category, so you must create any new categories before you configure a related attribute. For example, Devi could create an attribute category called Hardware Specifications to group attributes specific to tablet products, such as Hard Drive Storage or Processor Type.
Attribute and Picklist Override
Products inherit attributes and picklists contained within an associated object type. While you can’t delete these inherited components, you can override their value or control certain behaviors at the object type or product level, or both. For example, Devi could set certain attributes as required, hidden, or read only. You learn more about attribute overrides when you create object types and products.
You now understand the importance of product attributes in Product Designer. In the next unit, you create your first attributes and connect them to the picklists you configured earlier.