Types of Products

A product in the ChannelAdvisor system can be one of the following types:

Type	Description	Buyable	Has Quantity	SaaSplications Equivalent
Standalone	The default type of product. Self-contained and without any relationship to other products, it can be listed and purchased.	Yes	Yes	SKU
Parent	A container for one or more child items that vary by one or more attributes such as size or color. A parent does not have quantity and is not purchasable.	No	No
Child	A child product can be purchased and is always related to a single parent product. A child product usually exists for each variation of a parent product.	Yes	Yes	SKU
Bundle	Bundles are a virtual container for one or more other buyable items. For example, a bundle may contain one camera and two memory cards. Each bundle component, which can be either a standalone or child product, has a component multiplier quantity, which is used to calculate the bundle's overall quantity.	Yes	Yes (calculated)	SKU of type Kit

Flow of Product Creation

Outline the process of creating products (as a general concept):

The Product Creation and Update process usually flows something like this with REST API.

Client provides new SKU data to the system at will.
Some pre-requisites may need to be in place depending on design of the client products:
1. Variation Names/Types
2. Distribution Centers - ie when an order will be fulfilled by a marketplace store of products
During creation of SKUs, apply all known product attributes within the same product creation request for ease of use - otherwise individual attribute requests are required to append new attributes.
Apply Quantity information to products.

Once a product has been created, these are the options going forward:

CREATE Bundles	The products now need to be applied to Bundles for sale.
UPDATE Field Data	Data needs to be adjusted added for an existing product in an existing field
ADD More Data	Data needs to be added to an existing product in an existing field, or a new field and data needs to be added for a product
DELETE Individual Data	A data point needs to be cleared of the existing values, leaving a blank
DELETE the Entire Product	Remove a product from the system because it is no longer active
UPLOAD Product Data	Same as ADD and UPDATE, but executed in bulk
EXPORT Product Data	Extract data in bulk

To retrieve only orders that haven't already been marked as exported by the Developer Key and Application ID combination being used.
This is a good way to ensure order imports are not duplicated.
See more on all the options for filtering, querying, expanding data under the Getting and Filtering Data page

Default export status value is 'false'.
Export status is set by each Developer Key and Integration Application ID and can be set and removed at will through the API.
The Application ID is unique by the Integration created in the Developer Console, so plan to mark orders as exported and retrieve orders from the same Integration to ensure the goal of avoiding retrieving already imported orders.
Export status is not viewable in the system user interface and is not a field on an item through the API.
To test Export status on orders previously marked as exported=true, place a GET Orders request to retrieve orders without defining a specific Order ID. The orders marked as Exported should not be in the response.
Retrieving a specific order ID will always ignore the status, so this is not a valid way to test if Exported status has been set.

Property	Required	Note
exported	Required	Include in URL. Query value will be true or false. Note: there is no dollar sign ($) before this parameter.

Property	Required	Note
OrderID	Required	Include in URL. The ChannelAdvisor generated unique identifier for the Order. Cannot be substituted with Marketplace Order ID.

Channel Advisor API