Brink Commerce API: Product Management Service

Overview

The Product Management Service in Brink Commerce API is designed to integrate with various types of supporting systems. This document outlines the different types of products, their relationships, and how they interact with other services like Discount Management.

Types of Products

There are three different types of products:

1. productParent
2. productVariant
3. addon

Transactional Products

Only productVariant and addon types are available for transactional purchases.

Data Handling

• Brink only needs to hold product content data related to cart and checkout. This is what needs to be visualized in the purchase flow.
• Product content data for product display pages, listings, and categories is handled by a PIM (Product Information Management), CMS (Content Management System), or DXP (Digital Experience Platform).

Relationships

productVariant and productParent

• productVariant has an explicit relationship to a productParent.
• productParent serves as a key for productVariant.

addon

• addon has a one-to-many relationship with productParent.
• It can be used for addon services to a product, such as insurance or gift wrapping.

Tags

Tags are set in key:value pairs on productParents and productVariants. They are used to create promotional selection using the Discount Management Service.

Accessing Product Data for CX purposes

• Management API - The management domain API allows reading product data per service (Price, Product, Stock). These endpoints are not designed to be used for front end apllications
• Shopper API serves a front end with explicits sets of product related data such as prices (per storeGroupID/ market countryCode) for productVariants. In addition inventory data (stock) is accessible through the shopper API.

Integration Approaches

Dependent on the source of data, different integration approaches are better suitable. Brink needs the data stated previously for cart and checkout visualization.

Custom Attributes

Brink holds an undefined object called customAttributes which can hold merchant-specific data for cart display purposes.

Data Sources

• ERP: Since it holds Price Data as well as Stock, it should most often be the integrating client for feeding this data into Brink.
• PIM: Since it holds product content data, it should most often be the integrating client for feeding this data into Brink.
• DXP: It's becoming more common to use a DXP (Data Experience Platform) which can act as a unifier of all product and content-related data from different sources and orchestrate the distribution of this. In this instance, the DXP can act as the sole integrator to the different service endpoints.

Fields, Types, and Descriptions

Note: Please refer to the API reference for the most accurate and up-to-date information.