Visibility and orderability

In Mercatum product availability is separated into two distinct parts, visibility and orderability. For a product to be deemed available for purchase it must be both visible and orderable to a particular browser session.

Visibility

This determines whether a section of the catalogue is navigable to a user of the system. If a folder is not visible, then its contents are also not visible and will never show up in a search result. The following properties are examined to decide whether a folder is visible or not:

The site/account restriction properties are only available on folders, while the global flag is available on both folders and products. If checked on a product it will only affect that individual product, although there are usually better ways of achieving the same result by changing orderability.

Fig. 1 - Methods of adjusting catalogue visibility (no audio)

In addition to the above properties, a product is also deemed to be invisible if the system cannot determine a selling price for it. This can be a fairly complex bespoke operation and so is not detailed here. Performing an orderability analysis of a product will provide any information relevant to your installation of Mercatum.

There are two methods of changing folder visibility within the catalogue:

  1. Find the appropriate folder within the hierarchy and then manipulate the "Visibility/Orderability" section to change visibility for accounts/sites. This is convenient when you wish to make multiple visibility changes to a particular folder.
  2. Specify account/site properties in the hierarchy pane itself. This adds visibility options into the context menu for the tree, to affect the specified account or site. This is a good way of making changes to folder visibility for a single account or site across multiple sections of the catalogue.

To see these methods in action, watch the video in Figure 1.

Orderability

Orderability is a product-level property that determines whether a product can be sold or not. It consists of a flag, control of which is usually driven by back-office supply-chain data so it is not recommended to change this through the administrator unless:

  1. you really know what you're doing, or
  2. the connection between the back-office and the web is unavailable and you need to take a product offline in an emergency.

By default, this flag is the single deciding factor as to whether a product can be ordered. However, it is also possible to further restrict orderability to products that are in stock. While this can be done on a site-by-site basis, this is a system configuration option and thus cannot be changed through the administrator.

In the same way as for visibility, complex bespoke orderability details from the back-office may be viewed by performing an orderability analysis on a product.