Local and global Products

Our product-repository API allows you to share information about your products with eClear. Sharing of information is necessary to map your product to a class in our taxonomy. This mapping is called assignment and it is necessary to retrieve VAT rates.

You can organize your products in different shops. Different shops allow you to use the same product identifier for different products (Product identification) or to manage access to different products.

Product Identification

A product's identity is determined by its productId. productId is unique within a shop or across shops depending on whether the product is local or global. Local products have one and only one shop whereas global products are associated with zero, one or multiple shops. A shop must not contain a local and a global product with the same productId.

Global Products are created and mutated through the global products endpoint /products/global and local products are created through the local products endpoint /shops/{shopId}/products/local.

All actions, creating, updating, deleting or assigning, take effect for the product only in the shop the local product belongs to and in all shops that the global product is associated with.

Use cases

You typically want to manage products globally if you have a centralized product information system (aka material master). The advantage of managing globally is that there is no duplication of effort. For example, you assign a product once and this assignment is present in all shops. Manage your product locally if your product information system is not centralized. Then you can have a shop for each different product information system and the product identifiers in different shops can potentially be identical. Manage Products locally if the same productId in two shops can refer to two different products. In complex scenarios, you want to manage global and local products at the same time. Most of our customers have a single shop with global products.

Product Attributes

A product can have multiple attributes such as productId, productName or productDescription. Most of these attributes are managed through the product resource. However, files such as productPicture or files such as certificates are managed through the product file and product picture resources. There are also product attributes that are not part of eClear's schema but that you nevertheless want to make eClear aware of. These attributes are declared through the merchant product attribute resource and populated through the product resource. The more information you provide the better we can assign your products. If the information is very sparse we might not assign your product at all and as a result you cannot receive the VAT rate that is part of our taxonomy.