By Akeneo Certified, Solution Consultant Joseph Purayidathil
What Are Product Models and Variants?
Akeneo’s illustration of product variants.
Product Models and Variants have nothing to do with alternative universes. They’re just one of the best ways to group your product data to improve data enrichment, provide better customer experiences and lead to increased sales by improving SEO. Product variants are made up of a parent product that includes information that is shared among a set of child products and represents different variations of this parent product. Because product variants are very important, Akeneo does an excellent job creating and managing them. Product variants are simple to make in Akeneo and can be created at any time, even after adding your simple products into your catalog. Better data leads to a better Customer Product Experience (CPE).
Who Benefits and How?
Users of Akeneo and their customers are some of the biggest beneficiaries of an improved customer experience. By having fewer attributes to update you can increase your team’s enrichment productivity and efficiency for faster time to market.
With a PIM implementation, you will likely have to revisit your data models for your Akeneo instance. For example, some enrichment will occur if you create any text attributes or a minimal set of attributes. This enrichment and data modeling will be helpful when you begin building out.
Product Models are essential, providing many benefits to product data teams, users, and customers. By similarly grouping products into single product pages, more effort can be made to enhance the user experience on that product page. This improved on-page experience leads to improved customer experience, better SEO, more clicks, and improved incremental sales.
When Should We Use Them?
Product Models should be used as often as possible. Viewing and selecting the correct product variant should be a high priority for any product data team. Only group together similar products.
The only time using a product model is not recommended is when the variants are too different. The benefit of grouping can be outweighed by a confusing on-page experience. Stick to product models with similar attributes and vary in only a few areas.
How Do We Get Them?
Known for having an easy to operate interface, Akeneo has some great information about getting started with variants and creating product models. Your product data team may already be working through product models and variants. If they need a hand, or if you aren’t taking advantage of this useful feature, please reach out to Sitation for assistance through managed services.
