EN - Best Practices and Recommendations for Structuring your Catalogue (Feed)

Your catalogue is very important to us and we want to make the most of it!

Before sending a catalogue, with the data of all the products and associated behaviour of these, a series of steps should be important to take into account so that Empathy can recognize it.

Format

First, the feed files must be sent in XML/Json format or Zip containing them.

Encoding of the file should be “utf-8”

Feed types

There can be two types:

• Catalog (complete feed):
  • One with all languages → must have a field language inside
  • One per language

• Deltas: types:
  • Update data (replace invalid data by new ones)
  • Delete data.
  • Insert data.

Required fields:

There are some minimum required fields needed to be valid: 

• ID: identifier of each product
  • Must be unique
• Name:
  • String of the name of a product (should have sense)
• Image:
  • Check url (should not be broken or partial)
  • Sizes of them
• Product url:
  • Check url (should not be broken or partial)
• Price:
  • Number format
• Category:
  • Must follow a hierarchy (see example below)
• Language:
  • Can be:
    • one feed for one language
    • one feed with all the languages: the content MUST have a field language

NOTE: None of them should be empty.

Desired fields:

And some desired fields would be also great to be included:

• Category id:
  • A unique value for the category
• Description:
  • Must be specific for the product
• Sale price:
  • Number format
• Color:
  • Css value format
  • Common name (blue instead of aquamarina)
• Aditional image
• Brand

Let us see an example of this in xml:

When is a feed not valid?

• Incorrect format: tags to close, missing commas....

• Incorrect codification: of characters inside feeds

If these instructions are followed it will be much easier to start working with a proper feed