Guided selling in the SAP Commerce Telco Accelerator

Sep 20, 2020
  • sales, marketing and service
  • operations
  • SAP

SAP has recently redesigned their guided selling add-on, Telco Accelerator, and the process of creating guided selling journeys for customers is now accomplished using Product Offerings (PO). A Product Offering represents how the Product Specification (the functional know-how owned by the business users, i.e. what the marketing operator wants to sell at a functional level) is sold and contains market details covering a specific period of time.

Putting it into perspective

Here’s an example to clarify this terminology. Imagine a company that sells floors, and for every floor, they offer matching subfloors and baseboards. These are all products in the same product catalog, but not every subfloor and baseboard fits every floor. To model these restrictions, we will make a Product Specification for a specific floor. We can now link Product Offerings to this Product Specification. We will make a Product Offering for all baseboards and a Product Offering for all subfloors. In the storefront, we can use this logic to guide our customer through their purchase.

A tour through SAP Commerce

Let’s set up a similar example in the SAP Commerce back office. We start by creating simple Product Offerings for subfloors and baseboards, including prices.

Now, we need to create two groups for these products using Bundled Product Offering. When our information is synced, we can see that our Simple Product Offering now has Parent Bundles.

The next step is to create a Product Offerings Group representing the groups that will be shown on the storefront. It is possible to leave items out that are present in the Bundled Product Offerings, which will be shown in a final step that contains all the products that are not in a Product Offerings Group.

Our next step is to create a Bundled Product Offering to wrap the previous two bundles together. In the Product Offerings Structure, we can see how the hierarchy looks:

When we visit the storefront and look at the ‘floor product’ configuration, we see this:

All facets are generated automatically. The products are shown and optional.

When we have a look at the cart in the storefront, items chosen in the guided selling process are grouped together:

All products are in the cart individually, but some have a reference to the Bundled Product Offer. This is the minimum setup for the Guided Selling implementation of the Telco Accelerator. Since the redesign, it’s now possible to use some of the more complex features:

  • Add restriction: If the customer chooses a certain subfloor in the first step, we can disable some baseboards in the second step.
  • Add PriceRows for the bundle instead of using all the PriceRows from the individual products.
  • Preselect certain products.

Out-of-the-box and custom setups possible

If you want to introduce guided selling to your storefront and apply some of the complex features, the setup explained in this post is for you. Product Offerings are available in SAP Commerce Telco Accelerator 1907 and up. If you have your product relations set up through product references and don’t plan on using any of the complex features, a custom setup might be a better option.

Get in touch with us to learn how we can help you design the ideal setup for your business.

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