Catalogues

A catalogue is a curated subset of products designed for a specific audience or destination. Each storefront, channel, or integration has its own catalogue. Packtpub.com has a catalogue. Gamedevassembly.com has a catalogue. The Amazon Kindle store has a catalogue. Catalogues are the bridge between the full product set and the specific products that appear in any given context.

Manual and Rule-based Membership

Products can be added to a catalogue in two ways:

• Manual picks — explicitly add individual products. Useful for editorial curation, featured collections, or small catalogues where every inclusion is a deliberate choice.
• Rules — define filters that automatically include products matching specific criteria. Rules are evaluated continuously; products flow in and out of the catalogue as their attributes change.

Rules can reference any product attribute (type, language, price, lifecycle state, tags, authors) or Content Lake attribute (document tags, entity data, contract permissions). For example:

• All English-language Book products priced under $30 with Content Lake documents tagged source/topic/php
• All published products with contract/allow/distribution/channel/amazon
• All Video Course products by a specific author

A catalogue can combine manual picks with rules. Manually picked products are always included regardless of whether they match any rule. Rules expand the catalogue dynamically.

Catalogue Structure

Every catalogue has an owner — the person accountable for its purpose, rules, and overrides. Ownership makes it clear who to contact when a catalogue's membership looks wrong. Ownership can be transferred but never removed.

Catalogue Lifecycle

DRAFT ──────▶ ACTIVE ◀─────▶ SEALED
                │
                ▼
            ARCHIVED

ACTIVE and SEALED are reversible — a sealed catalogue can be unsealed back to active, and vice versa. This supports workflows like sealing a catalogue for a seasonal campaign, then unsealing when the campaign ends. ARCHIVED is a terminal state.

DRAFT catalogues are useful for staging. A team can configure rules, test membership, and preview overrides before making the catalogue live. Moving from DRAFT to ACTIVE starts emitting membership events, which triggers downstream distribution sync.

Catalogues and Taxonomy

Catalogues and taxonomy are complementary:

• Catalogue defines which products are available in a context (the set).
• Taxonomy defines how those products are organised within that context (the structure).

A storefront has one catalogue and one taxonomy. The catalogue might include 5,000 products; the taxonomy organises those 5,000 into categories and subcategories. Both are scoped to the client application — packtpub.com and gamedevassembly.com have different catalogues and different taxonomies.

Catalogues and Distribution

Catalogues define what products are in scope for a destination. Distribution handles how those products are delivered.

Catalogue (Product Management)
  │
  │  defines the product set
  ▼
Distribution
  │
  │  delivers artifacts, enforces rights
  ▼
Channel (Amazon, Shopify, etc.)

When a product enters or leaves a catalogue, a membership event is emitted. The Distribution service reacts — syncing inventory to Shopify, updating listings on Amazon, or refreshing a storefront's product feed.

Catalogue Overrides

Product information within a catalogue can diverge from the base product. Each catalogue entry can override any product attribute — title, description, cover images, pricing — without modifying the base product record.

Each overridable field has a sync mode:

• sync (default) — the catalogue entry tracks the base product. When the base product changes, the catalogue entry changes too.
• override — a static replacement value that does not change when the base product changes.
• template — a template with $variable syntax that resolves dynamically against the current base product state.

Templates

Templates use $variable syntax to reference base product fields:

Available template variables:

Templates are evaluated at read time. When the base product title changes, every catalogue entry using a $title template automatically resolves to the new title.

Override Scope

Overrides apply per catalogue entry, not globally. The same product might have:

• Base title "Go Microservices" in the product record
• Template title "$title — Now 70% Off" in the Shopify catalogue
• Override title "Microservices mit Go" in the German storefront
• Sync mode (base title) in the Amazon catalogue

Each catalogue manages its own overrides independently.

Catalogue Entry Structure

When no override is configured for a field, it defaults to sync.