An Offer in Violet refers to a specific product offered by a merchant. While some platforms use the term “Products,” we have chosen to use the term “Offer” to refer to these products. Offers are used to provide detailed information about specific aspects of a product, including variations. Each combination of these variations is referred to as a SKU, which is also included in the Offer Object.

Each Offer in Violet has a unique Offer ID, which allows for easy identification of individual offers. An offer also has an External ID, which is the ID assigned by the e-commerce platform.

Every Offer includes nested data for each individual SKU available from the merchant. Violet provides SKUs as part of the Offer response, allowing you to use them to populate your Product Detail Page (PDP) with all available variants. Additionally, the Offer includes the Merchant ID and structured media albums.

You can interact with our Offer model using our Catalog APIs, and a sample Offer can be seen below:

Generating a map of available SKUs for an individual offer across multiple variant types (such as color, size, etc.) can be a complex algorithm to implement correctly while integrating with Violet. To make it easier for you, Violet has a pre-built implementation of this algorithm as part of our open-source demo app that you can refer to.

Digital vs Physical Offers

Many items for sale these days are digital in nature and can be delivered to a shopper with out requiring shipping. Violet uses the type field to denote if an offer is physical and requires shipping or is digital.

This field follows the rules of the merchant’s e-commerce platform to determine if a product is digital or if it is physical. This can differ by platform, but in the event that a product has an unexpected value in the type field, the merchant will need to go edit that product in their e-commerce platform to make sure it is correctly configured as digital or physical.

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