Catalogs

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 nature of 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 so that you can 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 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 recommendation, 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.

Viewing Catalogs

You can access your catalogs by clicking the Setup gear icon next to the username. The catalog import tasks are displayed.

Click any catalog import task to search for uploaded catalog items.

 

Importing catalogs

There are few ways to setup your catalogs in Blueshift:

• Feeds via FTP/SFTP/HTTP
• From Amazon S3
• From Snowflake
• Direct file upload
• Using APIs
• Custom (speak to your Account Manager about this)

Notifications for import tasks

When you set up an import task, you can set up Notification Preferences to send a notification email to the specified email addresses when there is a change in the status of the task or when a certain percentage of records fail during import.

Import task status and details

On the catalog index page, you can view the catalog import tasks and filter them as required. Consider the following points about the catalog import tasks:

• You can view the status for any catalog import task. The status can be Draft, Launched, Paused, or Completed.
• The status tool tip provides additional information about the last execution status for each active task.
• Color codes indicate the success or failure of the last import.

  • Green indicates that all records in the last import were imported successfully.

  • Yellow indicates that partial records in the last import were imported successfully.

  • Red indicates that no records in the last import were imported successfully.

• The columns Last Processed, Item count, Number of Rows, Successfully imported, and Errors provide information for the last run for a recurring task.
• For any task where all the records were not processed, you can download the Error report from the actions menu.
• Use the actions menu to View, Archive, Remove, or Export a catalog.

Editing catalog import tasks

When you view the list of catalog import tasks, you can use the actions menu to Edit the task.

• You can edit an import task that is in Draft status.
• You can also Pause a launched task and then edit it.

Note: Tasks created using the previous UI (before March 2023) cannot be edited no matter the state, except for draft tasks where you are importing data from Snowflake.

Exporting catalogs

You can export a selected catalog or export the data for all the catalogs from the Catalog index page. For more information, see Catalog exports.

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" and 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. Deletion of catalog items is not allowed so as to maintain a historical record of the item.