Product Catalog
What are product catalogs?
A product catalog represents the entire collection of products that are available for purchase on an e-commerce store. Fanplayr uses your product catalog in two primary ways:
Your catalog data is initially used along with events captured from your store to train AI models that power intelligent product recommendations.
Once the initial AI model training is complete your catalog is used as a live database to return detailed information about products that are recommended to your users.
How are catalogs maintained?
Use one catalog per product language and currency combination.
Typically you will maintain a single product catalog within Fanplayr so long as all products in the catalog use the same language and currency. If more than one language or currency is used for products in your store, multiple catalogs will need to be maintained so that AI models can be trained using consistent data.
By default, you will have a single catalog for "all domains". Any additional catalogs must be linked to one of your domains. You can create new catalogs from the catalog list.
Import catalog files to create and update products.
Catalog files are structured data files which represent one or more products you wish to create or update. Each import operation is additive and merges products into the catalog rather than replacing the entire catalog.
By default, Fanplayr supports the Google Catalog JSON structure for catalog files. In addition to this format, Fanplayr may be able to work with CSV exports from some e-commerce systems so long as they provide the same required data as the Google Catalog JSON format.
Updates can be imported into Fanplayr via the Web Portal or as direct FTP uploads which can be automated by your system.
Perform regular imports to improve recommendation quality.
It is important to regularly synchronize your product catalog with Fanplayr to ensure that your recommendations contain the most update-to-date information regarding product prices, stock state and other details.
Viewing catalogs and imports
A list of all catalogs for your account are shown under the Account Settings area of the Portal. Each lists the language and currency of all products in the catalog as well as the total number of products that have been imported and number of products currently in stock.
Clicking the View imports link takes you to the catalog's import section where you can view the status of current and past import operations, and initiate new imports.
Common properties and actions displayed for each import operation include:
State — The overall status of the operation:
Pending — An import operation that is waiting to be executed.
Running — An operation that is currently being executed.
Completed — An operation that has finished without any major errors. Note, a "Completed" operation may still have minor errors where where some products failed to be imported.
Failed — An operation that was not able to run through to completion or where zero product entries were successfully imported.
Source — The operation creation source (Portal or FTP).
Item Count — The total number of product entries identified in the update file.
Success Count — The total number of product entries that were successfully imported.
Failed Count — The total number of product entries that failed to imported.
Download Logs action — A link to download the operation logs which will identify any errors encountered which can be used to correct the catalog import files you generate.
Creating / Editing Catalogs
You can create any number of additional catalogs, but each additional catalog must be linked to a specific domain.
The editable properties of a catalog are as follows:
Name — Uniquely identifies the catalog throughout the system
Language — Informs the system of the catalog's language for interpreting parts of the catalog like product name and description
Currency — The currency for the catalog's product prices
Import Format — This setting tells the system the format in which to interpret the catalog imports. See Catalog format & requirements
Import Mode — Informs the system whether to replace the entire catalog when a new import occurs or instead try to merge the existing catalog data with the imported data
The linked domain cannot be changed after a catalog is created.
Master and Variant products
Product variants occur when an item that has different attributes, such as color and size, is grouped together with other related variants on a single product page. The common product definition that describes a collection of related variants is known as the master product.
For example, if a pair of shoes comes in 10 different sizes and 5 different colors, instead of having 50 separate product pages (one for each variant) the store may group them together as a master product with a single product detail page.
Your integration can be configured to track products on the master or variant level, and this choice will depend what your store supports and the level of information that is available for consistent tracking between page view and order events.
Catalog update strategy
Your product catalog can be configured to use one of two different update strategies:
Merge Products (default strategy)
This strategy adds any new products in the import to the catalog and updates any existing products (where the Product ID matches) with their updated attributes.
Replace Catalog
This strategy replaces the entire product catalog with every import.
This strategy could be used when your import file contains the complete list of products in your catalog.
This strategy is not recommended for very large catalogs or catalogs which are updated frequently as each import would result in significant processing.
Contact Fanplayr if you wish to use this strategy.
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