What is a reference entity?

Summary

Introduction to reference entities

In order to present you quickly the reference entities, let's take an example of a product page.

As you can see above are many types of product information visible on this page: text, images...

Some information are shared between different products (such as care instructions, or colors or even brands). This data can be complex to manage because it has its own attributes (e.g. a label, a logo, a description or photos).  
Those information may have dedicated pages on one's e-commerce website (e.g. a webpage describing a brand) or their information may be used to enrich product pages (e.g. the logo of a brand).

A bit of vocabulary

What is a reference entity?

A reference entity allows you to create and enrich natively in the PIM those common information that are shared and related to products.

A reference entity has its own attributes, its own life cycle and can be linked to products or to another reference entity.

It allows enriching common data related to products with a rich content (text, images...), more complex than just a code and labels.

For example, you can create a reference entity to manage your brands, designers, manufacturers, product collections or ranges, artists, cities, countries, colors, sizes, materials, care instructions, technologies, ingredients...

Let's take an example with a reference entity called Brand and a list of brands (Kartell, Alessi, Fatboy, Fermob...).

A brand is described by the following information:

  • a code
  • a label
  • an image
  • a description
  • a photo
  • a country

What is a record?

For the Brand reference entity, a record contains all the information regarding a brand like Kartell or Fermob.

A record may be related to one or several products.

 

Let's create your first reference entity!

From a single place, in a dedicated Entities menu, you can create your first reference entity, define its records attributes, enrich its first records and link them to products. Let's go!

  1. Create your 1st reference entity
  2. Add and enrich its 1st records
  3. Define a new product attribute to link this reference entity to products
  4. Link the products to the reference entity records