Only Admins and Content Managers can access the Product Catalog.
Products let you seamlessly bring your product data and assets together. Images, lab reports, and descriptions all managed in Lingo and shared with a click.
Product concepts
Before you start building, it's important to understand the main concepts behind Products and how each one fits together.
Product Types
Product types let you model different types of products with different fields. This helps minimize redundancy and ensures that each one contains the data it needs. No more, no less.
It's important to think about the products you will be managing and setup product types early in the process. Products can not currently be re-assigned to a different type after they are created.
Variants
Variants are the different versions or SKUs of a product that you sell. You can create products that have a single variant or manage them together under one "product".
Instead of entering each variant manually, Lingo will generate variants based on the options and markets.
Options are often what you your customer would see within a product page – things like Size or Color. Each product can optionally select up to 3 fields to be used as options.
Markets allow you to generate variants based on geographic region or similar. They are a built in field that can help filter your catalog so different markets only see the products relevant to them.
Channels & Kits
Once you have centralized your product data in Lingo you can manage distribution via channels and kits. Build shareable pages in Kits to distribute products along side your brand and marketing materials. Or keep product data in sync with external systems using Channels.
An applied example
To bring these together, let's look at an example with our outdoor brand, Aero.
Aero sells a range of gear that doesn't all fit the same mold, so they set up a few product types, each with its own fields:
Apparel — fields like Material, Fit, Weight, Color and Size
Footwear — fields like Terrain, Drop, Color, Size
Nutrition — fields like Calories and Dietary info
One of Aero's products, the Ridgeline Jacket, comes in a few options. For that product we can opt to use the Color and Size fields as options to create our variants:
Color: Glacier Teal, Desert Clay, Dune Cream
Size: Small, Medium, Large
That gives us 9 variants — one SKU for every combination of color and size (3 colors × 3 sizes). Each variant can share the same baseline data while overriding only what's different, like swapping in the product photos for each color.
If we sell the same product in the US and Mexico we could add those markets as well. this would generate 18 variants. While that sounds like a lot, we can make use of default values to quickly apply the same data across all variants, then override values where needed.
When to use Products
Products is a good fit when you need to:
Manage structured product data (SKUs, specs, pricing) alongside your visual assets
Track multiple variants of a product (sizes, colors, configurations)
Keep product records consistent and searchable across your team
Connect product data to the images and files that represent them
Keep retailers and partners up to date with the latest product data