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Anatomy of a CSM Listing

CSM listings are used to send information from Business Central to external platforms. Listings allow you to share different information about an item than what may be in Business Central or different from another sales channel

After you have created your listings from your Business Central items, you will be able to view and edit information for a specific sales channel on the CSM Listing.  

  • Open the CSM sales channel record for which you want to configure listings.
  • From the Related ribbon, select Listing menu and then choose Channel Listings
  • Open the record you want to configure or view

Let’s review the sections of the listing that CSM assembled from Business Central item data.

Note: listing information can also be populated from the external channel.  To learn move continue to Loading CSM Listings from External Channel.

General FastTab

Field Description Example Value
Sales Channel Code The Sales Channel Code this listing is for. WOOCOMMERCEB2C
Channel Item SKU The SKU which WooCommerce uses to identify the product 79999
Type

The Business Central Sales Line Type that this listing links:

Item: The listing links to a D365 BC Item
G/L Account: The Listing links to a D365 BC General Ledger Account
Resource: The Listing links to a D365 BC Resource
Charge (Item): The Listing links to a D365 BC Item Charge


Note: the Wizard will only build Listings for Items, however, you could create a listing manually with a different item type. Example use case: You would like your customers to be able to donate to a charity on your site, you could then record these donations to a “Due to Charity” G/L account on the Sales Order. 

 Item
No.

The number representing the Type. If the type was Item, this would be the Item No.

 1936-S
Variant Code

This is valid for Type Item only. If you are using D365 BC Variants for the item, you can specify which Variant is to be listed in this field. 

  
Unite of Measure

This is only valid for Type Item. This represents the Unit of Measure for the Item being listed. The wizard will default this to the Item base unit of measure, but you can select which item unit of measure is to be listed. 

 PCS
Channel Product Type

This controls the WooCommerce Product Type (Simple, Configurable, Grouped, Virtual, Bundle, Downloadable).

Note: this documentation will only cover Simple Items. Configurable items are possible but requires a more advanced setup of attributes. 

 Simple

 Listing FastTab

Field Description Example Value
Channel Product Name  The product name representing the listing.  Berlin Guest Chair
Channel Short Description

The wizard will default this based on the default settings you specified on the Sales Channel. In this example, CSM defaulted this value to the D365 BC Items “Short Description” Extended Text. It can be changed on the listing card if desired. 

 Beautiful fabric upholstered chair in vibrant yellow.
CSM Channel Primary Category

The CSM Channel Category linked to this Listing. If your listing does not have an assigned CSM primary category, then WooCommerce will automatically set it as ‘Uncategorized’.

If you need to change the categories that this item is part of, please go to WooCommerce admin and change it there. 		  
Blocked Not currently supported for WooCommerce  
Product Status

Select the product status that you want to assign to the CSM listing. This value will initially be assigned from the sales channel’s default product status, but it can be modified on a listing-by-listing basis, if desired.

When the CSM listing is sent to an external WooCommerce channel, this setting will be used to determine the status of the product in WooCommerce. In this way, you can control the way a product is made available for sale on your WooCommerce channel when it is sent from Business Central. 

Active: the product is available for purchase on your storefront
Draft: the product is currently in the process of being set up and is not available for purchase on your storefront.
Pending: the product has been fully set up but requires a final review/sign-off before it will be made available for purchase on your storefront.
Private: privately published products are not generally available for purchase on your storefront but can only be accessed by specific visitors. This is useful if you want to create client-specific or member-specific products.

If you update a CSM listing’s product status in Business Central and re-send the listing’s data to WooCommerce, the status of the product in WooCommerce will be updated accordingly. In this way, you can move a product from draft to pending, or from pending, to active 

 Active
Visibility Not currently supported for WooCommerce  

The next FastTab is the Listing Product Information FastTab. This is a powerful piece of CSM functionality allowing you to add additional product information (descriptions, images, etc.) to the listing that can be sent to WooCommerce.

The CSM Listing Wizard brings product information record(s) for the listing based on the Sales Channel settings.

You can see more details by clicking View/Edit on the ribbon. The Product Information Card associated with the Listing is displayed.

CSM Listing Descriptions

It is possible to maintain the descriptive text that is displayed with a product on an eCommerce platform, then send this information to the external channel along with other listing information, from within Business Central. There are two descriptions that can be assigned to each listing:

  • Short descriptions: a brief summary or tagline for the Short descriptions are defined on the Listing FastTab of the CSM Listing card.
  • Long descriptions: the full marketing text that accompanies a product on an eCommerce site.  Long descriptions are set up as unique product information records for a CSM listing.

It is possible to define default sources for both short and long descriptions for a given sales channel. When a new CSM listing for an item is created for the sales channel, its short and long descriptions are retrieved according to the channel’s defaults.

While short descriptions are always entered directly on the CSM Listing card, the way a long description is created depends on its source type. For example, when a long description is based on extended text, CSM will copy an item’s extended text directly to the product information record as part of the CSM listing creation process. Conversely, when a long description is based on item marketing text, CSM does not copy any text to the product information record but rather establishes a link to the item’s marketing text information. In this way, any changes to the item’s marketing text do not need to be regenerated for the CSM listing.

Adding a Long HTML Description to the Listing

You must assign a long description to CSM listings before they can be sent to WooCommerce. If a default long description has been defined for the WooCommerce sales channel, a long description line will be automatically created for new CSM listings. If a default has not been assigned, however, long descriptions must be manually created for CSM listings:

You can include HTML as part of long descriptions to influence the format of the text.

  • Open the CSM listing that will have a long description.
  • Choose the Add Description to Product Information action on the ribbon.  A new CSM product information card opens.
  • In the Tags field, enter a value of Long Description.
  • On the Description FastTab enter a description for the item in the Description Raw HTML field.  You can include HTML as part of long descriptions to influence the format of the text. The Description HTML Preview FastTab presents a preview of the text, including any HTML format adjustments.
  • Close the CSM product information card

A way to add a short description can be accomplished in the Item Card > Related > Item > Extended Text.

  1. Click New to add a short description
  2. It will take you to a window where the descriptions can be added or modified. 
  3. Fill in all the necessary fields in the General FastTab.
  4. In the Description field you will enter Short Description or Long Description.
  5. In the Lines section this is where you will include details for the short description.
  6. The Sales and Purchases FastTab have toggles enabled by default.

Once you get to the point of setting up CSM Listings by creating a Listing Wizard, you will see the short description on the CSM Listing for the configurable item.

CSM Listing Attributes

When a CSM attribute set is assigned to a CSM listing, a separate line is added to the CSM listing’s CSM Listing Attribute List FastTab. CSM will then attempt to assign listing-specific values to each attribute line based on the Business Central value to which the CSM item attribute is linked. For example, if we had a CSM item attribute that was linked to the Vendor Item No. field on the Item table and that CSM attribute was assigned to a listing, CSM would assign the vendor item number from the listing’s linked Business Central item to the attribute line.

Note: when working with configurable items, the way attribute information is presented will differ depending on whether the listing is a parent or child item. Please see the documentation on configurable item attributes for more information.

CSM will automatically assign attributes to a CSM listing at the time of listing creation, but you can manually update a CSM listing’s assigned attributes by choosing the Actions ribbon, then selecting the Data menu and choosing the Synchronize Item Attributes action. CSM will review the CSM listing’s assigned attribute set and update the listing’s attribute lines based on any changes that have been made to the attribute set. For example, perhaps there is a new attribute by which you want to group your items. If you set up the proper CSM item attribute and then assign it to a listing’s attribute set, executing the synchronization action will automatically add the new attribute to the listing.

You can also execute this synchronization action from the CSM Listings list page, allowing you to update multiple listings at once. When this process is completed, CSM will present a message to the user specifying the number of listings that were successfully synchronized and the number of listings for which this process failed. You can review the CSM Listing Synchronization History table for more details into which listings were unsuccessfully updated.

CSM does not support the automated synchronization of CSM attributes and WooCommerce product variant options except when working with configurable items. As a result, the information on the CSM Listing Attribute List FastTab is largely informational.

CSM Listing Children List and Item Variations will be covered in another section.

Availability FastTab

It is possible to instruct CSM to calculate availability for an item and then send this information to WooCommerce. It is necessary for the External Inventory ID field on the CSM listing’s Inventory Information FastTab to be populated with the WooCommerce product’s unique variant ID; this information value should be automatically retrieved by CSM when the listing is initially associated to the related WooCommerce product.

If default product availability calculation settings are defined for a CSM sales channel, they will be assigned to new CSM listings that are created for the channel. It is possible to modify these values on a listing-by-listing basis:

Field  Description  Example Value
Send Availability Setting to determine if this item will send availability to the external platform. True
Availability Basis Select the Business Central value that will be used as the basis for the item’s availability calculation.  Availability
Compare Availability To

Select the Last Value Sent option. This will instruct Business Central to calculate the item’s availability from the last availability quantity that was sent from Business Central to WooCommerce.

The other option, External Inventory on Hand, is not supported at this time. 

 Last Value Sent
Available Channel Percent Enter the percentage of Business Central availability that will be sent to WooCommerce. This percentage will be applied to the item’s quantity when calculating availability for the listing. This is useful if you want to retain a portion of your on-hand quantity as safety stock. 90
Available Min Qty Threshold Enter the minimum available product quantity that will be sent to WooCommerce. CSM will not send an available quantity that is less than the defined minimum threshold to WooCommerce; in such a scenario, an available quantity of zero will be sent to WooCommerce. 10
Subtract Threshold from Avail  Select this field to instruct CSM to subtract the defined minimum

quantity threshold value as part of the listing’s availability calculation.

  
Available Last Qty Calc Quantity to be sent to the channel after calculation has been completed.  Calculation can be done manually or as part or automation routines.  
Available Last Qty Sent The quantity that was most recently sent to WooCommerce.   
Availability Requires Update Should be marked to tell CSM to update availability the next time automations are run.  

Listing Status FastTab

This section is largely informational to show when, how and by whom updates were made to the listing.  Of importance would be the External ID.  This is product identifier on the external platform and is used to properly link this CSM Listing to the proper item on the platform.  

Next: Sending Listing Data