Products

Shoes, mobile phones, bird houses or entire restaurants.

To Topsort’s systems they’re all products.

These products are organized into a catalog. This catalog provides vendors - and marketplace owners - with a pool of products they can promote in campaigns.

For example, in the diagram below, a catalog provides products (shoes in this case). The sneakers in this catalog are promoted in a sneaker campaign.

What is a product?

The main question here is: “What is the thing you want promoted in your marketplace?“. Those things are your products.

Variants

In a marketplace, one product might have several variants:

• Small green t-shirt.
• Large blue t-shirt.
• Medium yellow t-shirt.
• etc.

Depending on what should be promoteable on your marketplace, a different product “level” is appropriate.

Usually vendors are not interested in promoting t-shirts based on their size, however color might still be relevant.

No SKUs

If you’re running a marketplace that sells physical products, your products can usually be identified by their SKU (stock keeping unit).

However, not every marketplace deals with such products.

For example, maybe your marketplace is a food delivery app and your products correspond to restaurants. Or, it’s a travel marketplace and your categories correspond to destinations and your products to hotels.

Whatever your product is, you need to make sure that it has an ID that can uniquely identify it in our systems.

We treat these IDs as opaque strings, so use something that makes sense to you.

Properties

A minimal product consists of:

• ID: A unique identifier.
• Name: Human friendly name used in Topsort UI.
• At least one category.
• At least one vendor.

Additional optional properties are supported:

• EAN code.
• Description.
• Brand information.
• An image.
• Price.

Importing products

Products can be imported into a catalog in a number of ways:

• Importing using a product feed.
• Autodiscovery via the Proxy.