This article describes what is possible with product feeds. When you are ready to get going, we will likely need a call to agree on an approach, provide credentials, etc.
Jump to: SFTP | Blob Storage / S3 | Shopify | Contentful
Introduction
What are product feeds?
Product feeds, or content/article feeds, describe the detail of available content on the website. For e-commerce stores, this will be a list of all of your available products. For content websites, it could be a list of all articles.
The metadata is typically the most important part of these - such as having Names, Images, Prices, Review/Ratings, Brands, Colours, Sizes, Stock Levels, etc.
Why would you import your product feed into Optimize?
Having this information opens numerous doors in Optimize.
If we need to build product tiles with our recommendations, having access to live data like Names, Images, Prices, etc. means we are always accurate and not looking back at historically collected information.
If we need to serve "similar product" type recommendations, having a full list of attributes about the product/content allows us to pair products with eachother.
If we need to serve any product/content at all, it's key that this is in stock so we're not showing users things they can't purchase.
So, for many reasons, having access to your product feed unlocks numerous features within the Optimize platform.
What shape might these take?
We are able to ingest feeds in formats such as CSV, XML and JSON.
CSV is preferred, as we've found it to have the smallest footprint of all traditional feeds which makes transferring thousands of products/article information far easier.
We have specific solutions avaliable for certain technologies such as Shopify, Intelligent Reach and Contentful - see below.
If your chosen technology is not on the list, please still get in touch - we are likely able to work with all vendors.
Does the format matter?
No.
We are able to consume feeds of any shape and size - primarily because our team will process these into formats that are best suited for the job, and do so on an adhoc basis.
You may also compress your data with .ZIP or .GZ, but we ask that you do not use any proprietary format where specialist tools are required to extract your data from the archives.
Approaches
In this section, we will discuss various approaches to getting data to us. They focus more on the available mechanisms. For solutions to specific technologies, jump to that section.
Push to our Blob Storage / S3 bucket
Approach
Behind the scenes, Webtrends Optimize uses Blob Storage containers as a drop-zone for product feeds. These are then processed, turned into APIs, etc.
Microsoft comes with APIs and SDKs in many languages (Java, NodeJS, Python, .NET etc.) that should make this an easy process for any developer to transfer data into our Blob containers.
We provide you with endpoints and keys that will allow you to read/write into the blob containers.
Known limitations / things to consider
Often, if this is technology you're not familiar with, you will need a developer to engineer a solution here. Microsoft Azure is a well-connected platform and we give customers direct access to it, but we find many services still don't have out-of-the-box connectors with it.
Beyond this, there should be no reasonable restrictions with this approach.
Push to our SFTP Server
Description
We wil provide you with credentials for sending data to our SFTP server. You can push your product/content feed/s to this container.
Your credentials will look somewhat like:
user: account.prodfeed-production.user
pass: GxzTWwQpSrUQTPgtEkQxqmMHbkDJTUcw
host: account.blob.core.windows.net
full connection string: user@host
Known limitations / things to consider
We use Microsoft Azure Storage SFTP for this service.
You'll find the most up to date information at:
Pull from your API
Description
We can download feeds from your endpoints/APIs.
Some solutions, such as Intelligent Reach and Shopify, come with APIs or endpoints containing the information we need. We can download this on a scheduled basis, if given the credentials to do so.
For example, all shopify stores have mystore.com/product.json as a public endpoint, which contains a json product feed that we can easily import and make use of.
Known limitations / things to consider
The API needs to either be public, or we will need to be given credentials.
We can support large files, as long as the API does not have built-in timeout mechanisms.
Pull from your Blob Storage / S3 bucket / SFTP Server
Description
We treat all of these in a similar banner. Much like we make these available to you, you can make yours available to us.
With credentials for how to access, we can routinely pull down information directly from your storage/servers.
Known limitations / things to consider
None.
Solutions
Here are direct solutions to places where we routinely receive product feeds from. For a more theoretical understanding of the available mechanisms, jump to Approaches
Shopify
Shopify typically comes with a public Storefront API that allows us to access all information we need, including product and category details.
We do not typically need much/any support to ingest this data, we just need to enable it.
The format of the URL is typically similar to mysite.com/product.json.
And we will receive structured data in the format of:
{
"products": [
{
"id": 7621768118383,
"title": "...",
"handle": "...",
"published_at": "2024-08-13T15:44:02-05:00",
"created_at": "2024-08-13T05:59:33-05:00",
"updated_at": "2024-08-13T16:52:16-05:00",
"vendor": "...",
"product_type": "...",
"tags": [
...
],
"variants": [
{
"id": 42500040851567,
"title": "...",
"option1": "...",
"option2": null,
"option3": null,
"sku": "...",
"featured_image": {
...
"src": "..."
},
"available": true,
"price": "3.50",
...
}
]
}
]
}
Intelligent Reach
Many of our customers will have feeds hosted by Intelligent Reach. Most commonly, they will be hosted on public endpoints similar to:
https://files.intelligentreach.com/feedexports/some-guid-here/filename.csv
You will likely need to contact Intelligent Reach to arrange this if you're not already using it.
Once made available, we can pull the feeds down using the API approach on a scheduled basis.
Google Shopping Feed
There are many ways in which Google Shopping feeds can be shared with us.
Many customers will opt to send it to us via the SFTP approach.
It may also be possible to share your feed into a Google Sheet, or provide programmatic access to Google Merchant Center or use the Google Content API for Shopping - things we are happy to explore with you.
Contentful
We will need your Content Delivery API token from Contentful. You can find it here:
Go to Settings > API Keys
Add a new API key:
Give it a relevant name:
You will be given a screen with credentials - we need the Content Delivery API key:
Share this with us, and we will be able to retrieve all of your content assets from Contentful:
[{
"metadata": {
"tags": []
},
"sys": {
"space": { ... },
"id": "...",
"type": "Entry",
"createdAt": "2024-07-28T16:04:46.112Z",
"updatedAt": "2024-07-28T16:04:46.112Z",
"environment": { ... },
"revision": 1,
"contentType": { ... },
"locale": "en-US"
},
"fields": {
"name": "...",
"slug": "...",
"about": {
"nodeType": "document",
"data": { ... },
"content": [
...
]
}
}
}]