Managing item catalogs

There are two ways to import an item feed to Synerise:

1. Create a catalog, prepare an XML file, and set the automatic import of the feed to a catalog (the imported element is later referred to as an item catalog).
2. Import Google Merchant feed.

Requirements for item catalogs

Limitations

• The name of the item catalog must be an alphanumeric string without any special characters nor whitespaces, following this regex pattern: [a-zA-Z0-9]*.

• Item attribute names must be an alphanumeric string without whitespaces, following this regex pattern [-_a-zA-Z0-9]*.

• Item attribute string values must be alphanumeric. They can’t contain following characters:

  • " - quotation mark
  • ' - inverted comma
  • . - dot
  • , - comma
  • space or any white character

  Therefore, complex.name is forbidden and you should rather use camelCase: complexName (preferred) or underscore format: complex_name.

• Synerise accepts any properly formatted JSON which contains itemId and with proper key names. Later, item attributes are being returned by the API without changing or parsing values, which also applies to HTML/XML tags as values. You should handle the raw data retrieved from API in a way that will avoid the risk of XSS attack.

• Attribute names are case sensitive.

Format

The format of an item is a JSON. Each object represents an item with its attributes, for instance:

{
    "itemId": "Xa34ad3d",
    "intAttribute": 5,
    "floatAttribute": 2.5124,
    "stringAttribute": "asfdqw",
    "timestampAttribute": 1356846157,
    "booleanAttribute": true,
    "arrayOfStringsAttribute": ["A", "B", "C"],
    "nestedObject": {
        "a": 1,
        "b": "value"
    },
    "nestedObjectsArray": [
        {
            "x": "y"
        }
    ]
}

Accepted values of attributes

• string: "foo"
• integer: 12
• float: 12.34
• boolean: true/false
• nested objects: { "sub": { "a1": "v1", "a2": "v2" } }
• array (of strings, integers, floats, booleans, nested objects, arrays): ["foo", "bar"]
• timestamp: should be formatted as Unix timestamp, for example, 1356846157
• date: string dates are not interpreted/parsed - you should add a field which is formatted as a timestamp

Unique identifier

Each item (each JSON document) must contain an itemId field which is a reserved key used as a unique item identifier. Its value type must be a string and it’s case sensitive. As itemId is an item identifier it is specially treated:

• It is always returned by search API
• It is always returned by recommendations API
• Events (especially page.visit and transaction.charge) should contain matching itemID

Special field

category is a special attribute which is used to define the hierarchy of categories which an item belongs to. It must have the following format:

X > Y > Z

Where X is a top level category and Z is the lowest category level. For example, Electronics > Phone and Smartphones > Smartphones. Category levels should be joined with > (literally space>space). When you have an item which belongs to more than one category, you can pass the additionalCategories field in the following format:

"additionalCategories": ["A > B > C", "D > E > F"]

Both category and additionalCategories are used when you filter by categories.

Requirements for Google Merchant

• Build your feed according to Google Merchant Center Help recommendations. Synerise supports the tags described there.

• In the XML Prologue, define two namespaces as follows: "xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0" xmlns:c="http://base.google.com/cns/1.0"

• All tags that are defined by Google Merchant Center Help must be preceded with a g: prefix. The only tags that do not use the prefix are: <title>, <name> and <link>, and your custom tags that are not defined by Google Merchant Center Help.

• The list of the obligatory tags (written in angle brackets):

  • g:id
  • title
  • g:availability
  • g:product_type
  • g:price
  • link
  • g:image_link

Feeds which are in Google Merchant XML format are automatically transformed into items format according to following rules:

"attributes": {
	"fason": "Scarf",    
	"model": "Tortona",    
	"additionalPrice": {
		"value": 43.99,
		"currency": "PLN”
	}
}

"attributes": {
	"synerise_filtering": {
		"process_type": "SALE_OF_GOODS",
		"market": "b2c"
	},
	"Rodzaj_Etui": {
		"Rodzaj":"book"   
	}
}