# Product merchandising

> Recipes for merchandising a Shoplazza store from your app: create products with variants and images, organize collections, set inventory, and publish.

Bring products to your storefront from your app: create products with variants and images, organize them into collections, set inventory, and publish — all through the Open API. Two recipes cover the storefront side instead: carrying shopper-entered values to the order, and pricing by a measurement.

## A complete merchandising flow

A new product moves through these stages, and each step maps to one recipe:

1. **Create the product.** Create it with options, variants, and images in one call — it starts as an unpublished draft. See [Create and update products](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/create-and-update-products).
2. **Refine variants and images.** Add variants or images incrementally, or look them up by SKU. See [Manage variants and images](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/manage-variants-and-images).
3. **Organize it.** Group the product into a manual or smart collection so shoppers can browse it. See [Organize products into collections](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/organize-collections).
4. **Stock it.** Set inventory per variant at a location. See [Manage inventory](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/manage-inventory).
5. **Publish it.** Flip `published` to true (or schedule it) so the product is visible on the storefront — back in [Create and update products](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/create-and-update-products).

If an external system is your source of truth instead, mirror the catalog into it — see [Build a product sync app](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/build-product-sync-app).

Two recipes cover the storefront side. Anything the shopper types in at purchase time — engraving, a gift message, a size — travels with the line as custom properties; see [Add custom properties to cart and orders](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/add-custom-properties). When that input also has to set the price, see [Sell products priced by measurement](/docs/app/use-cases/product-merchandising/sell-by-measurement).

Jump straight to any recipe:

## What you can build

Following the recipes above, you can build the demo app below: create a product with variants and images, organize it into a collection, set its inventory, then publish it to the storefront — all from your own backend.

![Product merchandising demo: create a product with variants and images, organize it into a collection, set inventory, and publish to the storefront](https://cnres.appracle.com/b03a0591c115637dd56b4aad5b111c15.png)