Allow items to be added to PIM without a manufacturer or brand Association

Porter Pipe said their #1 pain point is how to handle commodity items. They are an AD subscriber and for commodity items like PVC pipe AD has them set up as multiple items coming from multiple manufacturers/brands but they don’t want to show the manufacturer/brand. They want them to be set up like generic items but would like to use the enriched content. I told him they could set them up like private items with Porter Pipe as the manufacturer but that is a lot of manual effort and they would lose the enriched content. In a lot of cases, these commodity items are they biggest sellers so they want to make sure they maintain the enriched content so they show up high in search results. He said that this was a big topic at the recent AD conference that a lot of members complained about. I think this would be relevant even for non AD subscribers, though.

Michael from Porter suggested: I’m envisioning a UI enhancement where it would have the ability to flag a product/group of products with what attributes would be active/visible. Where brand display wouldn’t have to be global change. Basically something could be a way for the CIMM user to quickly/easily modify content visibility, structure and layout on product pages.