Product Data: Setting up a Product Feed

In this article you will find information on how to upload and manage your data feeds.

Introduction

To ensure optimal utilization of Crobox's capabilities, setting up a product feed is crucial as it forms the cornerstone of its functionality. These feeds are indispensable for both creating experiences later on and maintaining your product catalog.

It's advantageous to have multiple locale-specific feeds alongside an enrichment feed that caters to all locales. Regional feeds are necessary for populating our catalog with products, while the enrichment feed serves to augment the app with additional product details.

We offer the flexibility to add feeds via scheduled fetch URLs, or manually in CSV or XML formats. See further information below on how to upload these different formats of data feeds.

You may find these URLs through other platforms in use by your business. For example Google Merchant, Channable, Shopify, etc. This method is preferable within the app as it provides real time data updates, without having to manually update the data feeds.

Scheduled Fetch Upload

• Go to Crobox App, navigate to Product Data and select the sub-heading Feeds.

• Click on Import, then select Create New Feed.

• Input the Data Feed URL and select Next.

The Create Data Feed presets are used to set up your data feeds and import the properties of your data. Here you can choose the name of your feed, the amount of times it automatically synchronizes with the source (your fetch URL), and set up and activate properties.

Continue filling the following fields with the necessary information:

• Feed Source: The feed file type will be automatically recognized based on the uploaded fetch URL.

• Feed Setup:

  • Data Feed Name: The name of your feed will be identified as when in the feed section of the app.

  • Data Feed URL: The URL the Crobox app will fetch your data from (this will be filled due to the previous input URL step).

  • Synchronization Frequency: The amount of times per day the app will synchronize its data with the live updates of your data source.

  • Starting at: The time of day the fetch URL will first update. Depending on the chosen frequency, the fetch URL will synchronize periodically throughout the 24 hour period.

  • Feed File Type: This is the format of your fetch URL data.

• Advanced: Advanced settings typically remain unchanged. If you require a modification, please contact your Account Manager.

• Source Fields:

  • Target Locales: This is the region that the data you are uploading will be applied to. All locales can be selected if the data can be applied to all of your regions.

If the region you'd like to use isn’t available or hasn't been set up, please contact your Account Manager.

To complete your feed setup, please follow the Product Mapping instructions provided at the end of the article.

Manual Upload (CSV and XML)

• Go to Crobox App, navigate to Product Data and select the sub-heading Feeds.

• Click to upload or drag the file (CSV or XML format) to the area to upload.

The Create Data Feed presets are used to set up your data feeds and import the properties of your data. Here you can choose the name of your feed and set up/activate properties.

Continue filling the following fields with the necessary information:

• Feed Source: The feed file type will be automatically recognized based on the uploaded file.

• Feed Setup:

  • Data Feed Name: The name of your feed will be identified as when in the feed section of the app.

  • Feed File Type: This is the format from your uploaded data feed. The accepted file formats are XML and CSV.

• Advanced: Advanced settings typically remain unchanged. If you require a modification, please contact your account manager.

• Source Fields:

  • Target Locales: This is the region that the data you are uploading will be applied to. All locales can be selected if the data can be applied to all of your regions.

If the region you'd like to use isn’t available or hasn't been set up, please contact your Account Manager.

To complete your feed setup, please follow the Product Mapping instructions provided at the end of the article.

Product Mapping

The data that has now been imported will show below the initial set up fields and the data can be mapped to the properties (as they appear in the app).

Our software has autofill capabilities and will often suggest applying detected source fields after interpreting the imported data. It bases the autofill options with the already set up properties which you can see by navigating to Product Data > Properties.

Continue mapping the feed by aligning the source field with the internal target property:

• Source Fields:

  • Active: This is the switch to activate if you would like this data to import through to the app. Switch the toggle so it appears as blue to activate the data within the row.

  • Source field: This is the name of the column in your data feed that you have uploaded. This does not need to be changed.

  • Target Property: This is the title of the property within the app. If the property you require does not appear in the dropdown, you can type the title of your target property and follow the prompts to +Add.

We recommend that you use an identifiable and simple name (often the same as the source field). It will be used throughout the app in different experiences and enriching values to define rules and more.

• Target Level: This refers to if the data in this property is unique per product or if it is a variant of the original product. If the data is unique per product, select Product, if not, select Variant.

A Variant target level typically identifies values like color and size. It will help to prevent duplicate products in the recommended results of a product finder, for example.

• Locale Override: If you want this field to target a different locale, specify it here from the dropdown choices of the regions. Otherwise you can leave this blank.

• Preview Values: These are the values automatically extracted from you data feed import.

Further property settings can be optimized here by selecting the three dot menu on the right of each property row.

Select Save, followed by Run Feed to Update to commit the changes to the database. To modify uploaded feeds, select the applicable feed to access source field presets/options.

• If you have additional feeds to upload, you can utilize the Autofill feature when mapping the properties to expedite the process, as you may have some properties that you have previously set up in the app.

• If uploading an enrichment feed the locale will most likely be set for All locales as these attributes are consistent across all regions.