What is the difference between Master Catalog and Sales Catalog?

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Master Catalog

The master catalog is the central location to manage your store's merchandise. Everything you need in your store is contained within the master catalog. It is the single catalog containing all products, items, relationships, and standard prices for everything that is for sale in your store.

Every store in the WebSphere Commerce system must have a master catalog. You can share the master catalog across stores and define as many stores as needed.

In addition to creating a master catalog for your catalog management, you may also choose to create one or more sales catalogs for display purposes. A sales catalog may contain the same entries as the master catalog, but with a much more flexible structure for customer display purposes. You can have as many sales catalogs as you want. Refer to Sales catalogs for more information.

You can use the Product Management tools in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to view and manage your master catalog

Sales Catalog

There are two types of catalogs in a WebSphere Commerce system: master and sales. While a master catalog is the central location to manage all your store's merchandise and services, a sales catalog is a subset of the merchandise and services found in the master catalog.

Every store in the WebSphere Commerce system must have a master catalog. Only one master catalog can exist at a time, and multiple stores can share a master catalog. However, you can create one or more sales catalogs for customer display purposes. A sales catalog has a flexible display structure that allows you to associate products to more than one category, to suit the requirements of your store.

Sales catalogs allow you to maintain an unlimited number of catalog hierarchies and place products in any number of locations within a single sales catalog structure. Sales catalogs can be used to create unique hierarchies and product assortments for seasonal purposes, targeting specific customer segments or business customers. For example, you may have a Spring sales catalog, a Fall sales catalog as well as a Gold-rated Customer sales catalog.

You can manage your sales catalog from the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator and perform the following tasks:

• Create, change, or delete sales catalogs. You can create sales catalogs based on segments of your master catalog, or choose to create one from scratch.
• Create, change, find, or remove categories. Select new parent categories and rearrange the category tree structure for a new look.
• Link a category. Take a category from one sales catalog to another sales catalog. That category, and all its catalog entries, will then be displayed in both, or more, sales catalogs.
• Duplicate the structure of a category. From your master or sales catalog, you can duplicate a section of categories and subcategories to preserve a similar structure.
• Assign, find, or remove catalog entries from different categories.

Sales catalogs can be used in conjunction with the master catalog and contracts to control which products display for a particular customer. If a customer is not entitled to see a subset of the products in the master catalog, the contract system will make sure that customer does not see those products in the WebSphere Commerce store. The sales catalog can then be used to organize the products that the customer is entitled to see and purchase in a more meaningful way. For example, customers may buy products to support a business project. Instead of organizing products by department and sub-department, it might be easier for the customer to find products when the products are arranged in a manner that matches the components of their project. In this scenario, a top level category might be titled Network Replacement Project and the subcategories in the sales catalog would be Hardware and Software.

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What are member groups in WCS?

A member group is a grouping of members - users, organizations, or other member groups - used for various business purposes. Two kinds of member groups exist: implicit and explicit. An implicit member group contains users that share common attributes and are therefore considered members of a specific member group. An implicit member group specifies criteria on attributes that users must satisfy in order to be considered members of that member group. You can also explicitly exclude certain users although they satisfy the criteria. An explicit member group contains explicitly assigned users, who may or may not share common attributes. A member group can be both implicit and explicit at the same time.

Member group data can be stored only in the WebSphere Commerce database. Furthermore, member groups are not part of the membership hierarchy but are owned by organizational entities. This ownership determines the set of access control policies that apply to accessing the member group.

What is Member Subsystem in Websphere commerce suit?

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The Member subsystem in WCS  contains the data for participants of the WCS system.A member can be 

•  user, 
•  group of users (also known as a member group), 
•  organizational entity 

The business services provided by Member Subsystem are

• member registration :
• profile management 
• access control, 
• authentication 
• session management.

• Basic Working of Member Subsystem

The Member subsystem assigned roles depending on the activities in which users and organizations choose to participate. Assignment of roles is the responsibility of an administrator, known as Site Administrator. Once a member is assigned a role, access control component authorizes the member to participate in activities associated with the role. For example, an organization can be a buyer or a seller, or both. A user can also be assigned multiple roles.

• Member Registration

Registration data of users and organizational entities is stored in the WebSphere Commerce database or the directory server. Member groups data can be stored only in the WebSphere Commercedatabase. A registered user has a unique identifier and a password. If the WebSphere Commercedatabase is used as registry, the unique identifier is the logon ID. If the directory server is used, the unique identifier can be a DN or a relative distinguished name. For an organizational entity, only an administrator can create a new registration profile and approval is not required.

• Profile management. 

The site administrator is the key component for Profile Management.The  Site Administrator in WCS manages user and organizational entity profiles and data. It contains  organizations or organizational units, roles, users, and member groups within a site. There is Buyer Administrator and Seller Administrator and they manage users and organizational entities.

• Access control . 

Access control governs what tasks users can perform on  resources.In WCS there is an an access group which is a group of members defined specifically for access control purposes. In WCS Access groups typically group users based on their roles, organizations, and registration status. A Site Administrator creates, maintains, and deletes access groups for a site. A Buyer Administrator or a Seller Administrator can also manage access groups for access control policies. 

• Security

 In Webspehere commerce suit a user can be authenticated against a WebSphere Commerce database or a directory server. WebSphere Commerce supports two challenge types: logon ID and password, and X.509 client certificate. When logon ID and password is used, a user is authenticated against the WebSphere Commerce database or a directory server. When X.509 client certificate is used, the Web server performs the authentication.

Different type of users in WCS.

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