Create your product catalog

In order to display the recommendations on your channel, you must provide the product information such as product ID, price, inventory, and so on, in the form of product catalog. The catalog should be created and uploaded to Acoustic Personalization before you create a recommendation.

You can upload your product catalog either as a CSV file or as JSON data. Use the CSV file in the following scenarios:

• To upload a product catalog for the first time.
• To add new (custom) attributes to your product catalog.
• To update the values of existing attributes in the catalog.

Use the JSON data in the following scenarios:

• To update the values of existing attributes.
• To add new data for the existing attributes. 

To successfully generate recommendations, you must provide the values for all mandatory fields. You can use the non-mandatory fields to pass more product information. You can also filter the recommendations returned by the models effectively.

CSV file specification

By default, the CSV file uses comma (,) as the delimiter for the fields. You can also use the Pipe symbol (|) as the delimiter. You must save the file with the .csv extension.

Use commas to separate values when you add multiple values in a field. If you're using a comma to separate values, then you must use pipe as the delimiter between two fields.

The CSV file should contain headers respective to the catalog data and follow the same delimiter as used for catalog data. The required headers are mentioned in the table below.

The following table describes the format of the CSV file for product catalog upload.

Notes:

• If a field with data type as an integer is empty, then by default, its value is set to 0. For example, margin, inventory, product_rating fields.
• If a field with datatype as String (for example - Description) is empty, then by default, its value is set to "". All the custom attributes have datatype as String.  
• If a field with datatype as Boolean is empty, then by default, its value is set to False (availability).
• If the price value is empty, then it is not included in the attribute list. For consistency, it is recommended to use ISO 4217 currency code standard, "X CUR" where X is the numerical value and CUR is the 3-byte currency code. For example, 100.00 USD 

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Note:

After creating the CSV file with your product catalog data, save it with the UTF-8 encoding.

Adding custom attributes
To add new attributes to the product catalog, you must use CSV file upload. To update the values of existing attributes, you can use either CSV file or JSON data.

For custom attributes, the Name field can have spaces or multiple underscore characters. For example, Product color OR Product_color or Product_color_shade are all valid inputs. All the custom attributes must have datatype as String.

Here is an example of a custom attribute.

JSON data specification

You can update the product catalog as a JSON to modify the values of existing attributes. The following table describes the format of JSON to be used for product catalog update. If you do want to provide values for non-mandatory attributes, do not leave them empty. Instead, specify the value recommended in the Value to use if null column in the following table. Providing value helps to maintain a consistent JSON structure. For example,

• If the field custom_number_inventory value is null, then pass the standard value 0.
• If the field custom_boolean_availability value is null, then pass the standard value false.

Example JSON
The following snippet shows a flat sample JSON data for product catalog.

{
    "documents": [{
            "id": "cc_030",
            "doc_id": "null:cc_030",
            "title": "City Adventure Micropixels Technology Camera",
            "description": "The City Adventurer red camera with MicroPixel technology is   the professional camera with a 18-55 mm lens",
            "images": [
                "https://citycoolretail.acoustic-demo.com:7443/wcsstore/ExtendedSitesCatalogAssetStore/images/catalog/cc_main/cc_cameras_files/cc_030.jpg"
            ],
            "categories": [
                "cc_cameras",
                "cc_electronics"
            ],
            "brand": "Canon",
            "custom_number_inventory": 2,
            "custom_boolean_availability": true,
            "price_currency": "USD",
            "price_value": 450.99,
            "custom_number_margin": 314.993,
            "custom_string_vendor_id": "101"
        }
    ]
}