Customer Assortment

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As a webstore administrator, you can offer an optimized assortment of products to your customers. Offering the best mix of products is essential to customers' satisfaction. This way a webstore administrator can optimize the catalog with products that appeal to all customers as well as products targeted to the individual customers.

There are two features in SAP using which you can manage your catalog in the best way and offer your customers only the products which appeal to them. These features are: Sana feature called Customer Assortment and standard SAP feature called Material Listing and Exclusion.

Using material exclusion in SAP, you can create a list of materials that will be restricted for specific customers for a certain period. This means, that these customers will not see these materials in the Sana webstore and thus will not be able to buy them.

Using customer assortment in SAP, you can specify which products (materials) or products assigned to a product hierarchy should be shown to or hidden from the individual customers or customers within a customer account group.

You can access Customer Assortment either from the main window of the Sana Commerce solution (/n/sanaecom/webstore) or by calling the transaction /n/sanaecom/assortment.

Set Up Customer Assortment

Step 1: In the Webstore Id field, select a webstore. If you have multiple webstores, you can set up customer assortment rules for each webstore.

Step 2: Click Execute.

Step 3: To add a new customer assortment rule, click Insert Row.

The table below provides description of the fields.

Field	Description
Allow / Deny	Select whether to show or hide products. Allow - show products or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy to the individual customers or customers within a customer account group. Deny - hide products or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy from the individual customers or customers within a customer account group.
Material or Product Hierarchy Selection	Define which products (materials) or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy must be shown or hidden. You can add one product, material group or product hierarchy, or a range of products, material groups or product hierarchies. If you add a range, a separate line will be created for each product, material group or product hierarchy in a range.
Customer or Customer Account Group Selection	Define which customers or customers within the customer account group should see or shouldn't see the selected products. You can add one customer or customer account group, or a range of customers or customer account groups. If you add a range, a separate line will be created for each customer or customer account group in a range.

Field

Description

Allow / Deny

Select whether to show or hide products.

Allow - show products or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy to the individual customers or customers within a customer account group.
Deny - hide products or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy from the individual customers or customers within a customer account group.

Material or Product Hierarchy Selection

Define which products (materials) or products assigned to a material group or a product hierarchy must be shown or hidden. You can add one product, material group or product hierarchy, or a range of products, material groups or product hierarchies. If you add a range, a separate line will be created for each product, material group or product hierarchy in a range.

Customer or Customer Account Group Selection

Define which customers or customers within the customer account group should see or shouldn't see the selected products. You can add one customer or customer account group, or a range of customers or customer account groups. If you add a range, a separate line will be created for each customer or customer account group in a range.

NOTE

When you add a range of products or customers, a separate line is automatically created in the Customer Assortment table for each rule. Thus, there is no way to edit customer assortment rules. If you need to edit the existing customer assortment rule, you must delete it and create the new one.

When you add a new rule to the customer assortment, edit or delete the already existing rule, the last modified date of all items affected by the rule will be updated.

NOTE

The last modified date of all items affected by the rule can be automatically updated starting from Sana Commerce Cloud 95_6 in SAP ERP.

After you configure the customer assortment rules in SAP ECC, you should update the product index by running the Product import task in Sana Admin.

It will check whether some product data has been modified in SAP ERP, synchronize the changes with Sana and apply them to the webstore.

NOTE

All products which are added to the Customer Assortment table are customer specific. This means that they are shown in the webstore only to the customers set in the customer assortment rules.

It is also possible to import customer specific assortments to the Customer Assortment table from a CSV file. For more information, see Sana Data Upload.

NOTE

Limitation: If the customer or customer account group is listed in any of the deny rules, the following customer or customers within the customer account group will not see the product or products assigned to the product hierarchy from this rule, even if there is another rule which allows to see it.

For example, there is the customer account group for which a certain product is denied. There is another rule, set for the individual customer from this customer account group that says that the product that is denied for the customer account group is allowed for this specific customer from the group. In this situation, the rule which allows to see the product to the specific customer from the customer account group does not override the rule which denies the product to be shown to the customer account group. Therefore the customer still will not see the product.

Enable Customer Assortment Rules in Sana Admin

If you configure customer assortment rules in SAP, you should also enable them in Sana Admin. Open Sana Admin and click: Setup > Products > Stock and assortment. Three customer assortment modes are available: Complete, Additional and Customer specific.

For more information about customer assortment settings in Sana Admin, see Customer Assortment.

You can create a transport request and transfer customer assortment rules from one environment to another, for example from test to live. For more information, see Transport Requests.