General
In SCAYLE, a merchant represents a seller of goods to the end customer. Merchants affect the product assortment, prices and stocks.
When creating a new merchant you can specify its name, a reference key and an optional priority parameter. After creating a merchant, you can additionally configure contact information and return addresses.
Default Merchant
The default merchant is a merchant that was created first, i.e. has the lowest ID.
Priority
When several merchants sell the same product variant, the price of the merchant with the highest priority will be displayed in the shop, but only if it's available at least in one warehouse attached to the merchant. If it is not available, the product variant will be sold at the price of the second-highest priority merchant and so on. The default priority for all merchants is 0.
Carriers
A carrier is a service that delivers goods to customers. After creating carriers in the system, you can associate multiple carriers with a merchant on a country basis. For example, it is possible to configure that a merchant delivers products using Hermes in Germany, but DHL in Italy.
Warehouses
Warehouses are used to store sellable items. When we say that an item is in stock and available, we mean that it has non-zero quantity in a warehouse. A single merchant might use multiple warehouses. In addition, different merchants might use the same warehouses.
The process of configuring warehouses for a merchant depends on the number of merchants in the system.
Single-Merchant Environment
If the SCAYLE platform has only one merchant, you can use this method. It will automatically create a warehouse with the given reference key if it doesn't exist, and then attach it to the specified shop country and the default merchant.
Product Assortment
Product assortment refers to a catalogue of products and its variations. You can limit the assortment to specific merchants or exclude some merchants from the shop.
Prices
Prices represent the amount of money required to purchase a product variant. SCAYLE allows you to define prices for each merchant in the system by providing a merchantReferenceKey in the payload.
If merchantReferenceKey is not provided, SCAYLE assumes that the given price information belongs to the default merchant.
Stocks
Stocks represent the number of available product variants in a warehouse. Similarly to prices, you can create merchant-specific stocks. The merchant context is controlled by the merchantReferenceKey field.
It is important to keep in mind that a warehouse with the given reference key must exist in the system. In addition, it must be connected to the merchant identified by merchantReferenceKey. If merchantReferenceKey is omitted, SCAYLE assumes that the given stock information belongs to the default merchant.
