The VCE Product Search is part of E-commerce Accelerator Add-on.
The VCE Product Search add-on enables you to search for and insert specific products from your product data while creating your email campaign in the Visual Content Editor (VCE).
What is VCE Product Search?
It provides you access to your products via the VCE editor to search in columns of the product data. The selected product information including, for example, product image, title, link, and price can be added to your email template block.
The inserted product overwrites the earlier configured e-editable elements in the given block with the added product information. The product information is read directly your product catalog at the time of insertion.
Prerequisites for using the VCE Product Search
Using the VCE Product Search requires the following:
- Your email template must contain multi-column blocks with e-editable elements.
Optionally, the e-editable elements of your multi-column blocks can be identified by trailing suffixes (-/_) and an index number (_1, _2, _3). Using the space character is strongly not recommended.
- Ensure that you have already created at least one email campaign with your email template, or create a dummy campaign with a few e-editable elements in it.
- Product data is imported through:
- Web Extend,
- SAP CC, Shopify and Magento plugins, and through
- Flexible Product Data Onboarding.
Getting started with the VCE Product Search
- For the first time, after opening from the Add-ons menu, the VCE Product Search starts with a data collection process, which may take 15-20 minutes.
- Within an hour the VCE Product Search gathers information about the product catalogue, locales etc.
It must have been completed at least once before further configuration. - Open an email campaign which uses the email template you intend to edit.
- In the VCE editor now you can search for a specific product in the current product data, and insert the product into a pre-configured block.
Workflow
- Configuring data localization
- Configuring custom variables
- Choosing an email template block
- Configuring email template blocks
- Synchronizing email template blocks
- Searching and inserting product information in VCE
- Updating the email campaign with product data in VCE
-
VCE product Search Use case examples
Inserting Relational Data placeholders in VCE
Known limitations
- Interface languages - Only English is supported currently.
- Product Data localizations - VCE Product Search has its own features to manage localized product data. This is however not connected to the Multi-language management in VCE. If using the multi-language editor, the products must be added for each version separately.
- Product data source - Currently, the VCE Product Search add-on supports exclusively the standard predict data sources as single-source of data.
- Data - The additional “predefined fields” (album, actor, artist, author, year) are not available.
-
Missing values in product data - Currently, the VCE Product Search add-on does not manage the event where the product information is missing for a mapped e-editable element being overwritten with product data.
Example:
- For instance, inserting a product into a block where Strikethrough-price is an existinge-editablethat is mapped tomsrpfield correctly, but the product data does not have any value formsrp.
- You are trying to insert localized product data, butdescription_frhas no value in the product data source. In this case the insertion does not happen. The insertion simply skips thee-editableelement, leaving the original "lorem ipsum" content. - Manual update of product data required - Product insertion inserts the current product data into the campaign, but it does not keep it updated automatically. An update feature is available to manually update the product data at a later point in time, if required.
- Reporting - There is no separate reporting available on campaigns that contain products inserted using VCE Product Search, nor on the click, etc performance of these products.
- Optional Content - It is not possible for the VCE Product Search add-on to automatically show or hide optional content. The optional campaign elements must be controlled manually in the VCE editor.