Glossary

This is a work-in-progress list of commonly used terms when discussing Oscar.

Partner
Fulfilment partner

An individual or company who can fulfil products. E.g. for physical goods, somebody with a warehouse and means of delivery.

Product Category

Categories and subcategories are used to semantically organise your catalogue. They’re merely used for navigational purposes; no business logic in Oscar considers a product’s category. For instance, if you’re a book shop, you could have categories such as fiction, romance, and children’s books. If you’d sell both books and e-books, they could be of a different Product Class, but in the same category.

Product Class

Product classes are an important concept in Oscar. Each product is assigned to exactly one product class. For instance, product classes could be Books, DVDs, and Toys.

Settings on a product class decide whether stock levels are tracked for the associated products, and whether they require shipping. So if you have products that require shipping and ones which don’t, you’ll need at least two product classes.

Used for defining options and attributes for a subset of products.

Product Options

Options are values that can be associated with a item when it is added to a customer’s basket. This could be something like a personalised message to be printed on a T-shirt, or a colour choice.

Product Options are different from Product Attributes in that they are used to specify a specific purchase choice by the customer, whereas Attributes exist to store and display the features of a product in a structured way.

Product Range

A range is a subset of the product catalogue. It’s another way of defining groups of products other than categories and product classes.

An example would be a book shop which might define a range of “Booker Prize winners”. Each product will belong to different categories within the site so ranges allow them to be grouped together.

Ranges can then be used in offers (e.g. 10% off all Booker prize winners). At some point, ranges will be expanded to have their own detail pages within Oscar too.

SKU
Stock-keeping unit.

A partner’s way of tracking her products. Uniquely identifies a product in the partner’s warehouse. Can be identical to the products UPC. It’s stored as an attribute of StockRecord

UPC
Universal Product Code

A code uniquely identifying a product worldwide.