Flexible Product Catalog Onboarding enables product data integration without having to meet prescribed requirements by cleaning up and transforming your product catalogs in a monitored and easy to troubleshoot way.

Instead of having to prepare the product catalog meeting all the requirements listed here, existing product feeds, or new feeds generated can be integrated with Emarsys in the most convenient way.

Data accessibility

Several options are supported to connect your product data:

• Provide Emarsys a URL to download the catalog on a regular basis.
• Provide the product catalog hosted on a FTP/SFTP server that Emarsys can use to check for a new catalog on a regular basis.
• If you are using a Magento or Shopify platform, then the Emarsys Plugin can be used to synchronize the products hourly.
• Use your Emarsys managed Google Cloud Storage Bucket to drop the catalog regularly. For more information on setting up this storage bucket, contact Emarsys Support.

Product feed requirements

Supported file formats:

• CSV
• XML

The only requirement is that the files have to be UTF-8 encoded.

Regarding the content, for each item, your file has to contain data that can be used to populate the required fields:

• Item
• Title
• Link

To use the Emarsys platform at its full potential, the data has to be available for the recommended fields as well:

• Image
• Category
• Available
• Price

This does not mean that these fields have to be present in the catalog, but these have to be available from the source data by transformation steps.

Here are some typical Flexible Product Catalog Onboarding use cases:

• Using custom XML product feeds (not only the standard GPF)
• Mapping fields to the Emarsys standard catalog fields (including advanced rules for composing standard fields)
• Creating categories in the required format, removing or adding new categories (based on rules)
• Mapping custom fields to required naming convention, support for all custom field types in Google Product Feeds
• Unifying image size using the Emarsys image proxy
• Field localization using multiple product feeds
• Merging offline and online catalog
• Unifying the attributes of the main item and the variants
• Fixing broken attributes (e.g. adjust link or image URLs, remove unnecessary characters)
• Removing items not intended to be shown in recommendations or reports

To check the product data imports, navigate to Management > Data Onboarding Management. All historical imports are listed, showing the result and the processing speed.

To see further details of an import, navigate to the Import Details page from the Import History table.

Each import consists of three steps:

• Access and load the data source
• Perform data transformation steps
• Initiate the import to the platform (Predict)

If each step is successful, the data utilization status can be checked by clicking Go to Predict Data Sources.

To check the content of the latest product catalog after applying the transformations, click the View Product Catalog on the Product Data Import History page.

On this page, the table loads 100 lines from your product catalog. Select the fields from the dropdown you would like to check, and turn off table cell truncation to see the full content of the fields.

In case you need to check a specific product not listed in the table, you can download the whole catalog file in CSV format.