Merchandise Hierarchy Overview

Merchandise Hierarchy helps you to identify market trends and realize shopper buying and demand by providing a custom organization of your company’s merchandise.

You can use merchandise hierarchies to categorize items or products and assign the items to the hierarchy. After you've assigned items, you have a strong framework for the downstream workflow for workbooks, reports, pricing, promotions, and more. This framework lets you make informed merchandising decisions.

Organizing your workbooks or reports using Merchandise Hierarchy helps you see specific details. Such information helps to identify sales trends across product classes and is invaluable when determining sales strategies such as promotions. For example, you can create a workbook to examine sales by department that at a glance shows you that sales of men’s organic cotton T-shirts are much lower than expected. For more information, see Creating Custom Merchandise Hierarchy Workbooks.

Each merchandise hierarchy is multi-level, with the highest level providing an overall enterprise view which then narrows down to families or classes of products. Hierarchy levels help you determine item relationships and efficiently manage items throughout the enterprise workflow while planning, buying, merchandising, pricing, and more.

Hierarchy levels contain nodes which provide simplified product definition and enable alternate views of product classifications. For example, a hierarchy level for women's clothing may contain different nodes for each of the available item classes such as skirts, pants, T-shirts, and shirts.

Merchandise hierarchies are configurable, so you can label each level and node as needed to suit your enterprise.

The Hierarchy Manager lets you visualize and manage your merchandise hierarchies. For more information, see The Hierarchy Manager.

General Notices