Once your product data file is ready, upload it to Emarsys, check if it meets our format requirements and then schedule regular updates.
To perform these steps, go to Management > Predict Data Sources and in the Product Data box click Manage product data. This takes you to the Product Data page, where you can manage everything related to your product data.
To minimize the effort to be invested into product data integration, please contact your Success Manager regarding the Flexible Product Data Onboarding pilot program.
Your first upload
The initial product data upload is used to validate the format of your data file. You have two options for upload.
1. Upload from the URL where your product data file is hosted
You can use this option to upload and validate both GPF and CSV product data files.
- In the Settings box, select the file format.
- Paste the full URL of the product data file into the URL for scheduled updates field.
- If you use a GPF product data file, enter the format and locale related settings.
- Click Save and then click Update from URL now.
If you use the GPF format and your country and language are not listed in the locale drop-down, select United States. If you want us to add a country or language to the list of supported locals, please contact Emarsys Support.
Notes
- You can use a wide range of protocols for hosting your product data file. For a full list of supported protocols, see the documentation of curl, the tool we use to fetch the data file from the URL you specify.
- If you upload a password-protected product data file, enter the file URL in the following format: https://username:password@mywebshop.com/catalog.csv.
2. Uploading your product data file
You can only use this option to upload and validate CSV product data files smaller than 100 MB in size.
- In the Manual update and validation section, click Upload file to validate.
- Browse for your product data file.
Validating and publishing product data
Once you have uploaded your product data file, we run our validation checks and display the results.
If issues are detected, they are listed with a short description and the affected fields highlighted. In such cases, click Discard this update, fix the issues and submit your product data file again.
As you can always discard a product file update without affecting existing product data, using the Update from URL or Update file to validate options is a safe way to test a new product feed. So feel free to experiment with your product data file!
If no issues are detected, click Activate update. It takes up to a few minutes for your product data to be published. You can follow the status of the upload in the Current Product Data box.
You can activate a product data file even if it passes the validations with warnings. But this is not recommended as the items which have issues will be missing from your Emarsys product database. In other words, you will not be able to use them in your campaigns and they will not be shown in any reports.
Checking published product data
Once the validated product data file is uploaded, the Product Search box becomes active, allowing you to search for products in your Emarsys product database.
Experiment with searching for items. Clicking a search result will take you to the Product Info page, which lists all the fields found in the Emarsys product database for the given item.
Notes
- If your product data file contains more than 2 million items, you will not be able to use product search.
- Items marked as unavailable will not show up in the search results.
- Be aware that in comparison to the Predict product search, the Visual CMS Product Search add-on will display unavailable products as well. This is possible to prepare emails with currently unavailable products in advance.
Here you can check if everything went well with your product data import.
This is something you should certainly do when you submit a GPF product data file, for example to check which GPF fields were kept during the conversion and how they are represented in the Emarsys product database.
Once you have also implemented our Web Extend JavaScript API, we will generate a product category tree on the basis of the category classification you provide for your products. You will be able to explore this category tree in the Category Explorer, which you can open by clicking the link in the upper right corner of the Current Product Data box.
Scheduling product data updates
A regular update schedule is needed so that Emarsys always has your most recent product data. For this, you will need to publish your latest product data file on a server from where we can fetch it.
- If you have not done it yet during the validation, paste the full URL of your product data file into the URL for scheduled updates field.
- Under the heading Schedule, specify how frequently you want us to update your product data.
- Select your timezone and save your settings.
We will update your product data at least once a day at about 22:00 in your local timezone by default. In the Schedule box, you can select a different hour or set up more frequent updates by selecting multiple hours at which the updates should occur.
Set up a reasonable update schedule that matches the dynamics of your web store. You may typically want us to update product data multiple times a day if some product attributes, such as availability or price, change frequently.
The actual updates will not necessarily happen every time at exactly the hour(s) you specify, as all scheduled updates are queued.
Past product data imports and their status are listed in the Update History table at the bottom of the page.
Forcing product data updates
Sometimes you may want to update your product data manually, for example when the latest scheduled update failed due to connection problems or when a scheduled upload is rejected.
In such cases, you can force a manual update by clicking Update from URL now and then clicking Activate update. This will instantly update your existing product data.
Product data updates are often rejected because the number of items in the new product data file is markedly lower than before. Before forcing an update in such cases, always make sure that the file’s contents are correct.
Remember that your Emarsys product database contains only the contents of the last update and is not cumulative. If you upload a file containing fewer items, only these will be known to Emarsys.
A forced manual update does not affect your upload schedule, and Emarsys will continue to try to update your product data as scheduled.
Troubleshooting
Some of my scheduled product data updates are not listed in the Update History table. Why?
Normally, every product data update attempt should be listed here, even those that fail. If an update is missing, it was probably skipped due to temporary network overload. We are continuously improving our infrastructure to prevent such scenarios, but if you run into them regularly, please contact our support team.
