Brands are used primarily for product classification. Classic usage is association of products with specific brand names, however brands do not have to represent manufacturer of the products. For example in case of services this could be service provider or for example for unbranded products this could be the name of the supplier. The aim is to give shop owners more control over the presentation of the products in the shop, namely:

• enable filtered navigation by brand names
• provide media presentation (e.g. brand logo)
• provide any additional attributes that are shared by products associated with this brand via attributes.

Brands themselves are very simple objects that consist of name, description and an image out of the box, but can be easily extended using the attributes framework.

These objects are shared by all shops on the platform instance (the same way as catalog data is shareable).

Brand names have to be unique which is a constraint imposed to prevent data duplication. However if some diversity is required it is possible to use brand name as a key rather than actual brand name and use custom attributes to add values such as display names and other attributes as necessary.