Table of Contents:

Upload

...

Requirements and

...

Limitations

...

• The file has to be a CSV (comma-separated values) file. Only this file type is accepted.
• If your product data is written in an Excel sheet (.xls or .xlsx) or in an OpenDocument format (.ods) which are used by LibreOffice or OpenOffice, the file has to be exported to a CSV file (see Export the Product Data File into CSV).

Anchor
DataFeedRequirements DataFeedRequirements

Data Feed File Requirements

...

The If you want to connect your product data directly to the Workbench, the product data CSV file needs to fulfill the following requirements (as mentioned above, please contact excentos for more complex formats such as XML or JSON):

Anchor
RequiredFileds RequiredFileds

Required Fields and Their Names

...

• The "Required" attributes in the table below are the minimal set of data that every Product Guide needs to work properly.
• The "Recommended" attributesare technically optional, but we recommend you using it is recommended you use them in order to display certain information like the product name or price in the product recommendation card.

General Data Attributes

General product attributes are identical across all product categories of your Shop / Website.

The required and recommended data fieldsattributes and the name conventions for the data fields, which can come from several data sources are:

Attribute Name

in Product Data

	Required	Recommended	Remarks	Visible in

Product

Recommendation
id	X	-	Unique ID

provided by the feed

for a single product Info If your feed does not contain that kind of information, an internal generic id is created to distinguish all products. This internal id is not visible in the data or the Workbench at all.	-
name	(X)

-

Product name

 Note: The

X	Name of the product Info The name is not technically required, but makes it a lot easier for you and the end-users to identify products in the result list.
image	(X)

-

X	Product image URL,

i

e.

e

g. a URL

on each

to the product

's  Note: The

image

on your website Info The

image is not technically required, but makes it a lot easier for you and the end-users to identify products in the result list.
price	-	X	Product price (

dot-separated

decimal number)
manufacturer	-	X	Manufacturer or brand name
detailUrl

 -

XURL to the product details pagepurchaseUrl

	-

(

X

)

URL

to shopping basket. We recommend to include it since the product recommendation can then directly perform a "add

to

basket" action without

the

user needing to visit the

product details page

first. However, this depends on the desired customer journey throughout your shop / website.

 Note: This feature has to be supported by your website and furthermore implemented for your individual requirements.

variantId	-	-	Master variant ID of a product. Useful if your product assortment contains e.g. color or size variants

and

. excentos can

then filter down the result list

collect them to make sure only the master product is displayed in the product result list.	-
description	-	X	Product description text

...

...

...

...

...

...

For  For more information on possible data attributes and which data might help to even improve the Product Guide, please also check https://www.excentos.com/en/documentation/data-feed-requirements.

Anchor
ProductDataSouces ProductDataSouces

Product Data Sources

Possible Product Data sources

Category-specific Product Data

Category-Specific Attributes describe the product itself, such as technical data, possible use-cases and everything that distinguishes one product from the other. For every Product Guide all the category specific attributes are needed, like e.g. the screen resolution of a notebook computer, the shoe size of a mountaineering boot, the range of height adjustment of an office desk etc. The more data there is, the more powerful and detailed the Product Guide can be.

The category-specific attributes can have the same data structure (mostly the case with CSV files) or a separate data structure / different attributes per category (mostly the case with XML data structures).

Category-Specific Attributes are not required for the data sourcing option „third-party licensed data“.

Example of category-specific attributes

Typical CSV file with product data for, e.g., bicycles:

Image Added

This is how the CSV file needs to look like if you open it in e.g. Excel if you have correctly set the text delimiters (in the example above a comma is used):

Image Added

Data Feed for international rollouts

...

You can either provide

• individual feeds per market / country / etc.
• or tell excentos a filter criterion within a central feed from which excentos can decide in which market to include the product.

If prices, product names and descriptions differ, it is recommended to provide separate data feeds for each market (although it would be technically possible to contain all markets in one feed).

Mime Type Detection

...

During the upload process the Workbench is analyzing the data file type. Only if the file is a valid CSV the file can be uploaded. The corresponding mime type (internal format) for CSV files is 'text/csv'. Unfortunately, there are 600+ words, word phrases or hexadecimal values (mostly at the start of the file) that can affect the mime type. That means that a word like 'Article' at the beginning of a CSV file results in the mime type 'message/news'. With that resulting type, it is not possible to upload the CSV anymore although the file is completely valid. Because of the huge amount of words and word phrases, excentos is not able to prevent these errors during the upload process. Nevertheless, the major part of these words/phrases are not relevant for a CSV file use case, like detecting python or image files.

If you have any problems regarding this issue do not hesitate to contact us. Some "bad words" examples are listed below:

Article

message/news

Path:

message/news

[version]

application/inf

StartFontMetrics

application/x-font-adobe-metric

Rar!

application/x-rar-compressed

Spreadsheet

application/x-sc

FWS

application/x-shockwave-flash

CWS

application/x-shockwave-flash

PSID

audio/prs.sid

BEGMF

image/cgm

icns

image/icns

AGD2

image/x-freehand

FreeHand10

image/x-freehand

MATLAB

application/x-matlab-data

#!/bin/perl

text/x-perl

#!/bin/python

text/x-python

FLV

video/x-flv

MOVI

video/x-sgi-movie

\037\213

application/gzip

Mime Type XML

Read about the Template Data File and Example Data File to get started building your own Data File

...