Understanding product publication

Important

This feature is currently in Early Availability (EA) status. For more information, see GraphQL API policy.

Product publication is a two-step process:

1. Publishing - Capture a snapshot of the product and create a stable copy for distribution.
2. Adding to the marketplace - Distribute products to a channel such as a marketplace catalog for listing and sale.

In the following sections, let’s go through these steps in greater detail.

Publishing

Product publication involves capturing a snapshot of a product at a particular point in time, and creating a copy that can be distributed and sold in a marketplace. This copy, once published, remains unaffected by any subsequent modifications made to the original product. This ensures that the product available in the market maintains its consistency and integrity, while enabling changes to the working version. Additionally, during the publication process a series of validations is done to ensure that the published product is fully functioning.

After making any update to a product, you can publish the updated version to a marketplace. This replaces the marketplace version with the updated version. The publishing process, therefore, allows you to manage the changes from your working copy to the marketplace, giving you complete control over when and what content your customers can see.

Only a marketplace manager can publish a product. A vendor, instead, submits a request for publication that has to be approved by the marketplace manager. The vendor is notified when the request is approved or rejected.

Adding products to a marketplace

After publishing a product, you can distribute and sell this product by adding it to your marketplace production catalog. This is a separate process from the publication itself. In the past, these two steps--publication and distribution--were combined into a single, synchronous UI-based operation. However, with the introduction of the asynchronous publication APIs, these two procedures are separate and performed asynchronously.

In other words, when a product is published, it doesn't automatically get added to the marketplace. Instead, you'll can decide when to distribute the published product by adding it to your marketplace production catalog. This is beneficial when you want to publish a product but not add it immediatly to the marketplace.

When you add products to a marketplace, you can also configure the visibility of a product. Not all products within the production catalog are visible on the marketplace or to resellers.

Publishing and adding products to the marketplace

The "publish and add to marketplace" steps are done via the UI. Currently, the UI executes these two steps as part of a single synchronous workflow. However this will change with the upcoming release of product publication APIs.

Workflow

The following diagram illustrates the different product management actions, flows and their respective outcomes in the context of product publication.

1. Create product - When a product is created, it is automatically saved in the staging catalog as a WORKING version.

2. Publish - A PUBLISHED version of the product is created, representing a marketplace-ready snapshot of the product.

3. Add to Marketplace - The product is added to the production Catalog and the marketplace, with your preferred visibility settings.

4. Remove products - Remove a product from the production catalog, thereby removing it from the marketplace. The product will remain in the staging catalog, with both, WORKING and PUBLISHED, versions intact.

5. Unpublish products - To delete a product, you first unpublish it (you cannot delete a published product).

6. Delete products - Delete products from the staging environment when you no longer need them. This is a hard delete so it removes the product from the database. A deleted product cannot be recovered. Purchased products cannot be deleted.