Smart Insight FAQ

No, Web Extend is not required. It is Smart Insight that collects your sales data from external sources.

The loading fails. This is a mandatory field. The file must be corrected and sent again.

The loading fails. This is a mandatory field. The file must be corrected and sent again.

We ‘create’ a pseudo contact for this order (basically all such orders are attached to one pseudo contact). This contact would appear as ‘generated’ on the Smart Insight screens and could not be matched with any contact in the Emarsys application.

No. This would duplicate the order, one would be loaded for the ‘pseudo’ contact and the other to the ‘real’ contact. The file must be corrected by you and a new complete reload is done by us. You are intended to communicate the problematic file load to Support and we do the reload.

An order with a customer ID missing from the Emarsys contact database will be loaded to the data warehouse and the related contact will be generated with only a customer ID and flagged as ‘generated’ in Customer Lifecycle. Using the ‘generated’ filter, this contact can be separated from the ones where the connection could be made between the orders file and contact DB.

Yes. If the unique customer identifier is added to a contact who previously was loaded as ‘generated’, they will turn to a ‘valid’ contact by the next data load. 

• order – The order ID of the order that this item was purchased in.
• date – The date of the purchase.
• customer – The ID of the customer who made the purchase. This must be contact data from the Emarsys database.
• item – The ID of the product that was purchased.
• c_sales_amount – The total amount of this sales item (i.e. unit price * quantity).
• quantity – The number of items bought.

YYYY-MM-DD is preferred. If HH:MM:(SS) is also sent, time will not be taken into account.

It is possible to add custom fields to the sales file as long as the field name starts with prefix “c_” (e.g. c_brand, c_webshop). Please note that the order of the columns matters. Columns can be sent in any order, but it must always be the same. End of columns must not contain empty rows.

No, the files we load contain the total price for items (e.g. 2 items cost 5 EUR altogether). No unit price is displayed and we don’t support such calculations in SI.

No, the load process stops and nothing from the sales file will be loaded. The error has to be fixed by you and the file needs to be reloaded after the fix by us.

They will be loaded as leads (contacts who have not bought anything yet). If they are not identifiable (cannot be matched with any Emarsys contacts) they will be ‘generated leads’ with ‘Unknown’ lead source and ‘New lead’ lifecycle status.

If there is no header in the file, the first row will be lost as this will count as a header. Header is required.

No, in this case the loading would fail. We only create ‘unknown products’ when the product ID for an order is missing from the product catalog. The file must be corrected and sent again.

Either:

• initial product catalog containing all products + daily deltas with the changes, or
• full product catalog each day, or
• daily feed only with the products that were ordered that day?

You should upload your full product catalog every time, to ensure consistency.

These columns are needed for SI, only the itemID is mandatory.

• item (string) – The unique ID used in your system to identify an item. This is the ID that all data-collection and rendering scripts will refer to.
• title (string) – The name of the product.
• category (list of hierarchy levels) – Describes the category that a given item belongs to (e.g. Electronics>Phones>iPhone|Telecommunication>Smart Phones>iPhone). A hierarchy can consist of maximum 5 categories, but any number or hierarchies can be included.

The loading fails. The file must be corrected and sent again.

The loading fails. The file must be corrected and sent again.

The files are loaded one by one (in alphabetic order) thus the last occurrence of the item will overwrite all the previous ones.

The item will be loaded and displayed as Unknown product ‘product ID’ on the second graph of the Past Purchases screen. In this case, a product is created by us in the Emarsys database with only a product ID, no other data is provided for it. Note that if an item is not included in the product catalog, it will also be an unknown product.

These items will be loaded, but they will not appear under any of the categories on the Past Purchases screen.

If an item that was loaded earlier comes again in a new file, the old item will be overwritten by the new one (e.g. modified product category or correction in item name).

By default, it is the first (top) level but any of the category hierarchy levels can be chosen for visualization. However, please note that the specified level cannot change from item to item (if it is set for category level 2, it applies to each and every item).

Refunds themselves are not added to the total number of orders, but full refunds affect this metric as fully refunded orders are not included in the total number of orders. As a rule of thumb, any order or order part with a positive sales amount is added to the total number of orders, while those having a negative or 0 sales amount are not.

When submitting returned items or orders, always use the order, customer and item IDs of the original order and provide a negative value in both the c_sales_amount and the quantity fields. Please make sure to populate the fields in your sales data file this way, otherwise refunds will not be properly represented in your reports.

Example

This is how the original order is uploaded in the sales file:

A week later the customer decided to return 2 items, which should be reported in the sales file as follows:

These two order parts will then be aggregated into a single order with the total value of 45, while the order date will remain unchanged (i.e. we keep the date of the original order). 

On the Revenue Impact screen the orders are not aggregated. Each order contributes to the revenue of the day when it was made. If we take the above example, the 100 Euros will be added to the total revenue of 15 October, while the refund worth -55 Euros will be reported for 22 October.

Sure. Just make sure that you follow the sales file naming convention, i.e. you name the file using the pattern sales_items*.csv. In other words, the file name must begin with the string sales_item and its extension must be .csv, while you can replace the asterisk with a number of characters of your choice.

As far as lifecycle scoring is concerned, any positive order counts as an activity, even if it is returned later. For example, if you upload an order with a positive sales amount for any of your First-time buyers, they will become and remain Active buyers even if the order will be refunded later, either fully or partially. Please note, however, that orders having a negative or zero value do not affect your customers’ lifecycle scoring.

Returns and refunds are not taken into account when calculating the number of purchases or the last purchase date. They do not count as an engagement, either, so they are not considered when last engagement is calculated.

In general, refunds only affect the total turnover of the contact and thus their buyer status.

Average order value is calculated by dividing the total of all sales amounts by the number of orders in the given period. Refunds are taken into account when calculating the total sales amount.

When calculating Total lifetime spend and the buyer status, all orders are taken into account, irrespective of whether their aggregated value is positive or negative.

The Monetary score is calculated by summing purchases over a defined time period. For returns, it is the date of the original order that matters. If that falls outside the time range, the order will not be taken into account when calculating the Monetary score (as well as total spend and buyer status), irrespective of whether the return transaction is within the given period.

No, Value Control ignores all orders with a negative or 0 aggregated value.

The registration date of these contacts will be set to the same as the first order date in SI by us. This won’t affect the Emarsys side since we don’t write back to Emarsys from SI, so the custom registration date field will remain empty in the Emarsys application.

The registration date of these contacts will be the date defined by Created date/Date of first registration. The custom registration field will not be applied in the last engagement in this case.

The contact was deleted but its click data remained. This contact will appear on the Lead lifecycle page, its lifecycle status will depend on the date of click and the lead source will be Unknown.

These filters can be used to create segments like ‘total spend or number of purchases in a given time period and /or to a given product.’ These filters differ somehow from the two filters with similar names on Customer Lifecycle (Total lifetime spend and Total lifetime purchases) because while those work from contact data, these two work from purchase data. Those contacts who register and purchase on the same day are regarded as leads for the first day and would turn to customer only the second day.

However, their orders would be loaded to the data warehouse on the first day already, while they are leads from the system’s point of view. This can result in slightly different numbers between the segments created with these similar filters.  

The "predict top categories" and the unique identifier (which identifies the purchase) fields has the same value for 2 contacts. You must amend the unique identifier for one of the contacts under the Other tab in the Emarsys application, or delete the unnecessary contact in order to make contact load possible.