What’s New In Comestri?

August 2020

Attribute Groups – easier Attribute management

When you’re in charge of a large product portfolio, managing attributes can take up a lot of valuable time.

Whether it’s introducing a new product range, adding next season’s arrivals, or updating product information – it all involves assigning or changing product attributes.

To make working with attributes easier, Comestri now lets you connect related attributes together into Attribute Groups.

The primary benefit of Attribute Groups is that you no longer have to assign each individual attribute to a Product Class. Instead, you can assign multiple attributes to the same Product Class simultaneously using a single Attribute Group, saving you time and effort.

Attribute Groups also help you streamline product enrichment, as you can associate many attributes with similar products much faster than before.

As information is entered once and can be attributed to multiple products, you can also reduce the number of data handling errors related to product upload.

Attribute Groups can be re-used again and again. For example, you can create generic Attribute Groups – like “Core Style”, “Core Colour”, and “Product Identifiers”. These can be shared across a wide range of product types like “Women’s Dresses”, “Men’s Shirts” and “Women’s Handbags”. Alternatively, you can re-use Attribute Groups that are common to similar products, as in the illustration below:

Comestri attribute groups for shoes. Better data management.

You can also set up highly specialised Attribute Groups for attributes that are unique to a particular type of product. For instance, a “Core Boots” Attribute Group would only be applicable to boots.

In the image below, you can see even more examples of specialised Attribute Groups related to different types of shoes:

Comestri attribute groups - help your products get found and sold

Attribute Groups are assigned to Product Classes using Product Families, which are another new Comestri feature. Product Families provide the link between Attribute Groups, Product Classes and products.

Product Families – support for diverse product ranges

If you’re selling a wide variety of products, or you’re thinking of introducing new product types to your existing range, then Comestri’s Product Families should be on your radar.

Product Families are a new PIM feature that allows you to associate multiple Attribute Groups with a large assortment of products that share the same Product Class Structure.

Each Product Family represents a particular type of product; for example, Women’s Dresses, Men’s Shirts, Baby Wear or Footwear.

The great benefit of Product Families is that they allow you to re-use a single Product Class Structure to support a wide array of products with different attribute requirements.

For instance, using Product Families, products as diverse as women’s dresses and footwear could share the same three-level Style-Colourway-SKU Product Class structure, but use different product-specific Attribute Groups. Women’s dresses might require an Attribute Group called “Core Dresses”, which contains Attributes like “Neck”, “Body Shape” and “Occasion”. Footwear, on the other hand, might use an Attribute Group called “Core Footwear”, which includes Attributes like “Shoe Style” and “Heel Height”.

Setting up a Product Family means you are creating a place where you can associate a particular Product Class Structure with selected Attribute Groups. In effect, the Product Family holds the different Attribute Groups at the Product Class levels you have specified.

When you create or edit a product, you assign a Product Family to it. The product then inherits only the Attribute Groups (and the attributes they contain) that have been assigned to that product’s particular class level by the Product Family.

Here’s an example of a simple Product Family for apparel:

Attributes, Attribute Groups, Product Families and Classes. How to structure data in Comestri

Up until now, Comestri required you to directly assign attributes to Product Classes. This meant that products inherited all the Attributes assigned to their particular Product Class level. In contrast, Product Families allow you to re-use a Product Class Structure because all Attribute Groups are held in Product Families, where they are associated with particular Product Classes, but the Attribute Groups are not directly assigned to Product Class levels.

In short, Product Families help streamline product management, making it easier for you to enrich and expand your product range to achieve your growth goals.

Shared References – boost content impact using re-usable blocks of product information

When buyers are searching online, it’s the quality of your content that determines whether or not you make a sale.

The definition of high quality never really changes: content must be relevant, valuable and consistent. But above all, it needs to be rich and compelling enough to captivate the attention of potential buyers.

So, for example, if you’re a wine merchant, you should be ensuring customers have easy access to detailed information about every wine variety you sell. Or, if you’re in the beauty business, you should be satisfying customers’ curiosity about all the latest skincare ingredients.

In other words, you need to ensure customers have easy access to rich, detailed and engaging product information – wherever they are in your online sales funnel.

Shared References are a new Comestri feature that can help immensely with this process. Shared References allow you to encapsulate related pieces of information into a single digital block, which can then be attached to any of the following Comestri PIM product elements: Attributes, Media, Categories and Prices. You can also freely re-use Shared References by attaching them to as many different products as you like.

Think of a Shared Reference as a kind of “wallet-sized info card” that you can place against any product and re-use again and again. How you display this information on the front-end of your website or marketplace is up to you.

When you edit a Shared Reference, the change is automatically made to all instances of that Shared Reference across your site.

Let’s look at some examples for a variety of industries below.

Wine Merchant

You need to provide potential customers with all the information you can about the wine varieties you sell. Using the Shared References feature, you can create a “Shared Reference Type” called “Wine Variety”. Under “Wine Variety” you can then set up a suite of Shared References that cover the full gamut of wine varieties: Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Riesling etc.

You can then attach these Shared References to every relevant product.

Here’s what one of these Shared References might look like:

Example of a shared reference in the Comestri's pim for ecommerce - Shiraz

Beauty Retailer

As a retailer of beauty products, you need to make sure customers have access to detailed information about today’s revolutionary skincare ingredients. Your Shared Reference Type might be “Ingredient”, and your Shared References would include actives like Retinol, Peptides, Niacinamide and Salicylic Acid.

Here’s an example of a Shared Reference related to skincare ingredients:

Example of a shared reference in the Comestri's pim for ecommerce - Hyaluronic Acid

You might also want to create Shared References for all of your brands:

Example of a shared reference in the Comestri's pim for ecommerce - Summer Rain

Monogrammed Handbags and Accessories

Customised accessories are today’s fashion favourite. If you’re selling personalised leather goods, Shared References can provide buyers with details of monogramming options as they browse your site. For instance, you could create Shared References for gold monogramming, silver monogramming, rose gold monogramming and black monogramming. All of these could be offered at different price points.

Your gold monogramming Shared Reference might look like this:

Example of a shared reference in the Comestri's pim for ecommerce - Gold Monograming

Whatever type of products you sell, Comestri’s Shared References can help you increase the impact of your content by allowing you to easily re-use the kind of rich product information that convinces customers to buy.