Shopping.com Partners Resource Center Developer Blog

I've been hearing a lot of confusion around products and offers as defined by SDC.  I'll try to explain the difference here, as well as the role of each within the SDC catalog...

The concept of a product within SDC is an entity sort of like a 'shell' around a group of offers, allowing comparison of offers for identical items from different stores. This shell also acts as an anchor to which we can attach things like reviews, specs, images, etc.

SDC has three types of categories based around this 'product' entity. Those where all offers are associated w/ products, or "productized" (e.g. Digital Cameras), those where some offers are associated with products, while others are not, or "soft productized" (e.g. Shoes), and those where no offers are associated with products, or "non-productized" (e.g. Clothing).

Productized categories generally contain items with unique IDs (UPCs, MPNs, etc.) where it is very simple to match each offer to a product. Soft Productized categories generally contain items which may not have unique IDs, yet many stores sell the same exact thing, and so some softer matching rules are needed (which aren't always able to match every offer to a product.) Non-productized categories generally contain items which are mainly sold by a single store, so products are not necessary, as each one would only have a single offer.

In general, I recommed you think of every category as soft productized or 'hybrid', as it is the superset of the other two (the API was designed with this philosophy.)  However, if you really want to distinguish between the three, the API provides a 'contentType' element for each returned category, indicating the mix of products and offers ('products', 'offers', or 'hybrid'.)