Intro
Your Product Inventory is a large storage of products which includes all of their changes since the creation of the inventory. Conceptually, it is like a product catalog (or any other feed) being checked and stored every day. This provides multiple items of information:
When and how each product was added to the catalog for the first time
How many variants it had
When a product went out of stock
What the highest and lowest price was (depending of the available data in the source feed)
To create an inventory, you first need a product feed. This product feed should ideally include all of your products that are relevant to a selected market with all of its variants. The better the inventory feed that is used, the better the outputs gotten from the product performance analysis and features. When an unideal source is used, it can lead to data loss.
One market can only have one inventory, however one inventory can be shared across multiple markets (if the data supports this setup). The paired statistics always reflect the market to which the assets are connected. So even if two markets are using the same inventory, its data won’t be mixed.
Product Hierarchy Levels
In addition to keeping the history of the products, an inventory has one more unique property: Product Hierarchy Levels. These are special columns that are defined from fields with IDs from the inventory source feed during setup and have two important functions:
Specifying the hierarchy between IDs that represent product variants and product groups in the feed
Connecting products from the inventory and performance statistics from the asset connected to the market
Each inventory needs to have at least one Product Hierarchy Level, and can have up to three Product Hierarchy Levels.
Product Level
Product Level represents the least granular level of the product IDs. If variants are included in the feed, the Product Level should generally be placed in the Group ID. In cases with no variants in the feed while all assets are using the same IDs, Product Level will be the only one used.
Variant Level 1
If you need to add one variant, Variant Level 1 is used to specify that there are some product variants in the feed that can be grouped under ID in the Product Level. The most common setup is having IDs representing product variants (for example, specific sizes, e.g. 123-XS) in the retailer_id used for the setup of Variant Level 1, and less granular IDs like group id (e.g. 123) in the Product Level.
Variant Level 2
It is possible to add a third Product Hierarchy Level, which is used if either or both of two conditions are met:
You can distinguish three types of ID based on the granularity
You need to use three different columns to pair statistics from assets connected on a market
This is called Variant Level 2 and represents IDs with the highest granularity. When setting up an inventory, it is necessary to check whether there is some hierarchy relation between a selected Product Hierarchy Level and, if so, to use it in the right order.
The less granular ID needs to be in the Product Level and the most granular ID needs to be in the Variant Level 2. If this is not set correctly then it can cause data loss. Additionally, the Product Hierarchy Levels should be set with consideration for all connected assets to a market, so it is possible to connect data from all sources to the inventory. Product IDs used in the connected assets needs to match with the Product Hierarchy levels in the inventory to match the data.