Import a Catalog

Note Merge data from disparate sources before importing into Marketing Cloud Engagement. The data services team can help with data preparation. Contact your account representative for details.

The two catalog import options are:

• Daily Flat-File Upload—The daily flat file upload is added to an FTP account or publicly accessible web URL and imported into Einstein Recommendations at the same time every day. You can upload a full list of all products and a daily delta file.
• Streaming Update—The Streaming Update option adds and updates products and content through another snippet of Server-Side JavaScript. All data must be available in the web layer sent in each call.

The data that is passed is the same no matter which method is chosen.

Tip If you opt to use streaming updates and batch upload concurrently, both sources must contain the same data to avoid one overwriting the other.

Visit Personalization Builder Catalog Field Definitions for a list of required catalog fields.

Product Recommendation customers often have a product catalog already generated and decide to reuse or fashion the daily import on something existing. Since the catalog data includes products, attributes, rules, and multiple languages the flat file catalog is often the more appropriate choice. If a specific Product Code has numerous SkuID, the streaming update call includes data for each variation, which can be a rather large payload. You can use Streaming Updates with Product Recommendations when all the data is available.

Content Recommendation clients are less likely to have a pre-created content catalog and often choose Streaming Updates. The data layer of the website or CMS contains the content to add to the catalog and is easily added using JavaScript.

There’s no direct functionality to delete a product recommendation. The current way to delete a product is to change the product's Online Availability via Attributes within the Catalog before upload. Set Online Availability for the product to N within the Catalog. This action prevents the product from showing up in recommendations.

There are two ways to name the file to be uploaded daily. A static filename or a wildcard.

• Static Filename: The static filename is uploaded daily. We recommend that you replace it on the FTP before the upload kicks off. If there are no changes in the file or a new one isn’t uploaded, the catalog import is skipped. An example of a static filename is product_catalog.csv.
• Wildcards in Filename: You can add a wildcard (*) at the end of the filename that allows a new file name to be updated daily. Add the date for the file at the end of the file and replace it with an asterisk (*) when adding to the upload UI.

Tip We recommend that you use the naming format static_filename_YYYY_MM_DD.xxx. For example, product_catalog_2018_01_01.csv. The filename is added to the upload as product_catalog_*. The filename is sorted in descending order, so we recommend adding the year first to ensure that it sorts correctly.