What is a product?¶

Akeneo provides a powerful and very flexible way to structure your products using an Entity Attribute Value (i.e. Product - Attribute - ProductValue) model.

For instance, let’s say we want to store cars in Akeneo.

A Car has multiple properties (or attributes):

• A color
• A manufacturer
• A price (a value and a currency)
• …

We build the Car Family (or “product type”) using Attributes. Akeneo is shipped with common attribute types:

• text;
• price;
• picture;
• date…

Once a Family is created, you can create products organized in one or multiples Categories, for example “Tesla Model X” in “electrical motorization” category.

Most of the time, we export data to various destinations: an eCommerce website, a mobile application, or a paper catalog. You can use Channels to provide a different data for each product according to the selected destination.

When you start a PIM project, the first task to do is to build the structure of the data from a “functional” point of view.

A job?¶

A Job defines a series of steps to execute to do a task.

To import data in Akeneo, we need:

• to read data and convert it into an understandable format;
• to map and validate this data into products;
• to save them into database.

To export data from Akeneo, we need:

• to read data from database;
• to process it into an understandable format (XML, JSON, CSV…);
• to export data into plain files or through a web service.

Because Akeneo PIM is open source, multiple connectors - or modules - already exist both for importing or exporting data.

That’s it! You now have the basic knowledge to start an Akeneo project.