Why is there no Listing SKU field for Program Listings?

[dacarter]

I'm very new to Canvas Catalog, and we're about to release our first paid program.  The program comprises 2 courses. Each of the courses has a Listing SKU, but the Program Listing does not have a Listing SKU field available. Is this for a reason, and if so, can someone explain why it is not a good idea to have a Listing SKU for a Program Listing?

Since we've not yet seen a Program purchase, I can't tell whether the SKUs for the 2 courses of the Program will be shown in the payment gateway audit trail or not. The SKU ordinarily shows up in the payment gateway audit trail as "Item Description" when an individual course is purchased. 

Thank you for your time reading this.

[dacarter]

I'm going to take a stab at answering my own question here. Does a program listing lack SKU because a program is essentially a bundling of other SKUs? I'm hoping that SKUs for the individual courses in the Program get bundled together and show up in the Item Description as expected when a program is purchased.

[jsowalsk]

@dacarter Would transaction IDs help from the payment gateway?

[dacarter]

Hi jsowalsk - thank you for your input. 

I wish. The Payment Gateway Transaction ID field is unrelated to any data coming out of Catalog's Analytics exports. We have to use Power BI to transform the Payment Gateway's "Invoice Number" field where it has incorporated the Catalog "Order ID" as part of its text. If it didn't do that, there would be no way that I can see to match up a Catalog Order with a Payment Gateway Transaction, other than "Let's see if we can match them up by date/time." That is why we are eager to be able to use the Listing SKU to help us match things up.  But we can't for Program purchases. Luckily for us, we are early enough in the game where we only have one sub-catalog with Programs listed - so we know any Payment Gateway transaction lacking an SKU is a Program and belongs to X department. Once more sub-catalogs start listing Programs, this is going require much more manual work to keep our books straight.  While I am working on encouraging more departments to come join up with Catalog, this point becomes a hurdle to overcome during my Demos.

I'm also going to put in a Feature Request to add some kind of mechanism to help create "Listing SKU" field conventions. This could be set with a "use your own SKU" or select from one of the following conventions (present one or more convention styles).  For example, one convention style could be "sub-catalog ID" + "-" + "listing ID". 

[jsowalsk]

@dacarter That is what I was going to recommend -- making a feature request.