How to Model Products in SAP Marketing Cloud for Multiple Markets

[Josef_Ehbauer]

SAP Marketing Cloud provides integration of products from SAP standard solutions. For each type of the SAP source system (i.e. S/4HANA, ERP and Commerce) only one single value is available in standard delivery. This implies that per product instance the values per source system do not differ.

However, in scenarios where customers run marketing, for example with different markets in commerce, or with different email campaigns per market, the product origin concept is quite powerful to capture different product master data per market.

If you want to use the product master with different URLs for its object page or its picture, you can implement a model, which is capable of handling multiple product instances for the same actual product using the product origin concept. The same holds true, if you want to enhance the product master with extensibility fields, for example for discounts or out of stock information, which vary for different markets.

Let’s look at a solution for the following example: A customer has markets for United Kingdom (UK) and Germany (DE) in commerce, and the product master varies for the object page and image (different URL). In addition, the product master has been enhanced for discounts in their currencies and out of stock information by means of extensibility. Product master data integration shall be handled from the connected PCM system of the corresponding commerce solution.

How can you enable two different records for specific products, one for the UK and a second for DE:

• Define different values for the origin of products from Commerce for the UK an DE, for example COMMERCE_UK and COMMERCE_DE using the implementation cockpit.
  


• Adjust integration of products from commerce so that each product instance being replicated from PCM is getting replicated twice, one record for product origin - COMMERCE_UK and a second for COMMERCE_DE. To do so, you could use the post exit of the standard iflow.


• When loading interactions from commerce, for example product views, abandoned shopping carts or sales orders, specify the product origin for the product in the captured interaction according to the commerce source application, where the data is loaded.

What is the result in SAP Marketing Cloud?

• When opening the app Products – Use and Resonance you will see for each product instance two entries, one with the values for the market 'UK' and a second one for the market 'DE'. They have both the same ID, but different Product Origins. The Product Origin column can be made visible using the Settings of the object search page allowing you to easily distinguish the products despite having the same ID. Setting in the object search page of the app.
  


• When creating an email in the Content Studio, you will see in the (F4) search help two different records, which can be included independently from each other into the email design.
  As a result, the email will contain the desired different values of the product, i.e. the URL of the object page and picture, as well as discounts in its currency and out of stock info will differ.


• When creating a predictive model for buying propensity, you select from the (F4) search help the right record for the predictive use case in the foreseen market. The predictive model will then use only interaction data for training with the reference of the product ID in combination with the specified product origin.


• When modeling a recommendation scenario for product recommendations, you must select from the (F4) search help also the right master record, because the recommendation scenario will use interaction data for the foreseen algorithm with the reference of the product ID in combination with the product origin.


• Finally modeling a custom operational report, for example sales orders with for attributed campaigns with a drill down on products in marketing analytics will also work. The report will return proper results, because sales orders of the different markets have the same ID, but only the product origin differs.

Overall, you will achieve with this approach a quite elegant model to use products in SAP Marketing Cloud with different attribute values for a use in different markets (e.g. different countries).