A catalog is a collection of items that end users interact with on your website or app. Catalogs are usually further organized into hierarchies of items called categories and include various attributes about the items like name, image, features, descriptions, size, color, weight, price, availability, and so on.
The catalog you create depends on your industry and the nature of your business.
- If you are an e-commerce company, your catalog would include products (SKUs) that you sell on your website.
- If you are a streaming service provider, your catalog would include movies and TV shows that users can stream from your platform.
- If you are an education platform, your catalog would include the various courses available for students.
You can integrate all your product or content feeds with Blueshift to deliver more relevant and up-to-date recommendations and content. You can also add new attributes for the items in the catalog when you update the catalogs.
Multiple catalogs
You can upload multiple catalogs to power recommendations and content across different messages, campaigns, or areas of your website.
Multiple catalogs are supported as long as product IDs are unique within and across catalogs. Additionally, we can sync the catalogs in real-time, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.
Using catalogs
Catalogs are used in the Blueshift Platform in the following ways:
| Recommendations | Using the Recommendation Studio, you can easily build content blocks for messages that pull items directly from your catalogs. You can create recommendations for everything from abandoned content, related items, top trending items, top sellers, most viewed, “customers also bought,” next-best-product, and more. For more information, see the Recommendation Studio overview. |
| Category affinity | If your website or app has a large catalog of products or content, you will often find that users have affinities towards different categories of products and items. The Blueshift platform computes user affinities based on behavioral & transactional data and keeps the affinity scores updated in near real-time. You can use the affinity data when you create segments and to personalize content. |
| Segmenting users | You can segment based on the user interactions with various items in your catalog for up to the last 6 months. While creating segments, you can also filter based on catalog/content attributes. For more information, see Segmenting users by catalog activity. |
| Derived events | The Blueshift platform has the ability to auto-generate and trigger smart notifications (email or push). The platform uses a combination of user metadata, transactions, browsing behavior, and catalog/content changes to trigger these notifications. For more information, see Derived events. |
Catalog activity
Before you can use the catalogs in recommendations, segments, campaigns, and so on, you must set up catalog activity.
Catalog Activity is created by combining the data from an event and the data from a product catalog item. For more information, see Catalog activity.
View, filter, and search catalogs
You can view, filter, and search catalogs by navigating to Data > Catalog from the left navigation panel. The catalog grid displays the list of catalogs along with key details. Click any catalog import task to search for uploaded catalog items.
Filtering options on the catalog grid
- Search by name – Locate catalogs by name.
- Filter by Author, Import Status, Update Frequency, Update Method, and Archived Status.
Basic search
- Search using a single attribute such as item ID, URL, name, or category.
- Apply match conditions like equals, contains, starts with, ends with, etc.
- Enter a search term to filter results.
Advanced search
- Search using multiple attributes combined with boolean logic.
- Use ALL, ANY, or NONE conditions for flexible filtering.
Both search modes can be used when searching across catalogs or within a specific catalog, helping you quickly find relevant items.
Deleting catalogs and catalog items
- When you Archive a catalog, the status for all the items in the catalog is set to "out of stock," the items are not available for selection in the Recommendation Builder when you create product recommendations for your customers. If a feed is set up for the catalog, the feed is deactivated.
- Use the Remove option to permanently delete an archived catalog. The catalog is deleted and the status for all the items in the catalog remains as "out of stock".
- You cannot delete items from a catalog. However, you can update the item availability to mark it as "out of stock." You can then use the options in the recommendation studio to exclude “out of stock” items. Deleting catalog items is not allowed in order to maintain a historical record of the item.
Import and export catalogs
Blueshift provides several methods and pre-built integrations that you can use to import and export catalog data.
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