Model a reusable SKU product content type

Understand the two approaches to modeling products

XbyK allows you to model both sellable products and non‑sellable offerings. The correct approach depends on whether the product takes part in ecommerce flows.

Use Model reusable Product SKU (this material) when the product requires commerce capabilities, such as SKU, pricing, inventory, fulfillment, or checkout.
Use Model reusable Product when the product does not require SKU-level handling. This approach is ideal for services, informational offerings, or items meant to be displayed or described but not purchased directly.

Choosing the right model ensures a clean, efficient catalog and prevents unnecessary ecommerce attributes for products that don’t need them.

Modeling commerce products in Xperience by Kentico requires careful planning. As an architect, you need to balance flexibility with structure, reusability with specificity, and editorial simplicity with technical needs.

The way you structure products impacts how easily editors can manage them, whether for a simple catalog or a complex multi-channel experience.

This material focuses on modeling product SKUs in Xperience by Kentico (XbyK) specifically for commerce flows. It helps you build a Product SKU content type that aligns with business goals and is simple to maintain and scale.

After completing this material, you’ll be able to:

Decide whether to store products in Content hub or a website channel, and understand the organizational implications of each approach.
Design a flexible Product SKU content type using reusable field schemas and dedicated content type fields.
Define Product SKU identifiers as reusable components that work across different product types and content items.
Compose related content such as manufacturers, product categories, and taxonomies to support the project’s business needs.
Choose from three different approaches to modeling product variants, understanding the trade-offs of each.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this material, you need to understand your organization’s commerce requirements, product catalog structure, and channel strategy. You should have basic knowledge of content modeling principles. Understanding how reusable field schemas work is also beneficial.

Who should read this guide

This material is intended for solution architects and content modeling experts. It focuses on designing the content model for commerce implementations in Xperience by Kentico. While the guide includes technical considerations, it focuses on modeling decisions rather than implementation details. Developers looking for code-specific guidance can find examples in documentation, namely how to model a product catalog.

Understand commerce requirements before creating your content model

Before defining content types and fields in Xperience, ensure you understand your project’s requirements. You may need to do a content audit and business analysis to gather the exact details you’ll use for your content model.

Begin by looking at your current product data. What information do you already store? How is the product content organized? What challenges do editors face when they work with product data?

Identify the business scenarios your product catalog must support. These may include catalog listing pages, detailed product pages, cross-channel commerce experiences, mobile apps, or headless storefronts that deliver product data via APIs.

List organizational needs, including product hierarchies, multi-brand catalogs, and international requirements like multi-currency pricing or region-specific availability.

Refer to Schema.org’s Product schema for guidance on structuring your product data in ways that search engines and third-party integrations can understand.

While you don’t have to include every Schema.org property in your content types, understanding the standard helps you prioritize the fields most relevant to your business. This increases the chance that search engines display rich results, such as prices, availability, ratings, and images, directly in search listings. Many third‑party integrations, including marketplaces, comparison engines, and product feeds, expect product data in a predictable format. This format is often based on Product schema and includes fields like description, image, brand, and SKU, along with additional properties for reviews and ratings.

Validate your product content model against standards before you finalize it. This helps make sure you’ve included all the needed properties and configured them up correctly.

The use case: Pawsome Pets product catalog

We’ll use Pawsome Pets, a fictional pet store selling live animals and accessories, as our example. This will help show the modeling decisions and patterns in each section.

Also, a similar Product SKU model will be featured in the upcoming commerce training materials for developers. Stay tuned and follow documentation updates to find out when we release the materials.

Pawsome Pets’ requirements

Sell multiple product categories: live pets, for example, dogs, cats, birds, fish, pet food, toys, accessories, and grooming supplies.
Display products on their main commerce website (modeling website pages and widgets will be covered in other guides).
Display product information to mobile apps and marketplace channels.
Support product variants, such as sizes, colors, flavors.
Show manufacturer information and warranty details.
Manage stock across multiple store locations.
Handle multilingual content as they are expanding into international markets.
Ship specific products to multiple countries.

This example highlights common scenarios you may face when modeling products in Xperience. You can apply these patterns and decisions used for Pawsome Pets to various industries, including pet supplies, equipment, fashion, and manufactured products.

Pawsome Pet’s product requirements

Before creating all the required fields in Xperience, take time to understand what information your products need to capture. Pawsome Pets, we’ve identified these core requirements through discussions with stakeholders:

From the merchandising team:

Provide a clear name and SKU for identification.
Include short descriptions for listing pages and emails.
Add long descriptions for detail pages.
Upload multiple product images (primary image plus gallery).
Specify price information.
Tag products with taxonomy tags for filtering and search.

From the marketing team:

Highlight promotional messaging and special offers.
Recommend products and cross-sells.
Indicate product availability status.

From the SEO team:

Structured data markup for search engines (SEO) and social networks (Open Graph).
Product metadata that works across channels.

From the development team: