Visual UGC offers the ability for Customers to create and update Product Tags within their Stack in an automated manner.
The feature can poll an XML Product Feed on a periodic basis, updating values such as Price, Description, Availability, and even supporting variances in Language or Locale.
To find out more about Configuring your Product Feed and Visual UGC's requirements, please read the guide below:
Feed Format:
Visual UGC Product Feed feature works with XML feeds, which are based upon Google's Product Merchant Feed type and Facebook's Product Catalogue Feed type.
Connection Type
Customers can choose to sync their Product Feeds from a publicly accessible URL or from an SFTP storage.
Required Elements:
The following elements are required to be included in your Product Feed in order for Visual UGC to be able to successfully synchronise the two systems:
<id> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters.
<title> - String : Between 1 - 150 Characters
<link> - URL : Between 1 - 250 Characters
<image_link> - URL : Between 1 - 250 Characters
<availability> - Options : 'in stock', 'out of stock', 'preorder'
<price> - String : Between 3 - 20 Characters
By default, Products & Shopspots will be displayed within a widget, regardless of their Availability. However, this behavior can be adjusted to only display Product/Shopspots that are "in stock", by adding the following parameter to the Widget embed code: data-available-products-only (value must be either true or false). If set to true, only the Products/Shopspots with an availability of 'in stock' will be shown.
Optional Fields:
Visual UGC can accept a range of additional fields in your Product Feed and append this to the Product Tag within your Stack. For the most common additional Fields, Visual UGC expects them to be in the following format:
<condition> - Options : 'new', 'refurbished', 'used'
<shipping> - SubElements : 'country', 'service', 'price'
<expiration_date> - dateTime
<brand> - String : Between 1 - 70 Characters
<gtin> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters
<mpn> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters
<product_category> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters
<product_type> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters
<additional_image_type> - String : Between 1 - 250 Characters
<gender> - Options : 'Male', 'Female', 'Unisex'
<age_group> - Options : 'Newborn', 'Infant', 'Toddler', 'Kids', 'Adult'
<color> - String : Between 1 - 25 Characters
<size> - String : Between 1 - 25 Characters
<item_group_id> - String : Between 1 - 50 Characters
<sale_price> - String : Between 3 - 20 Characters
<sale_price_start_date> - dateTime
<sale_price_end_date> - dateTime
<description> - String : Between 1 - 1024 Characters
Validating a Feed:
Visual UGC offers an XSD which Customers can use to Validate their Feed Structure or Build their Feed. This XSD is available here
Update Frequency:
Visual UGC offers the ability to Update / Synchronise your Product Feeds based upon the following schedules:
Daily
Weekly
Manual
Grouping Products across Locales:
Visual UGC offers the ability to store variance information for different locales (ie. USA / CAN-FR / CAN-EN) within a single Product Tag, allowing for customers to show different information (ie. Name, Description, Price, URL) via Visual UGC's Widgets.
For Visual UGC to group / link these variances from different feeds, the same <id> value must be used across each of the connected feeds.
Locale Limits:
Visual UGC does not enforce any limits around the number of different locale variances which can be stored on a single Product Tag.
Setting up your Feed:
To setup your Feed, you will need to go to Settings > Product Feed (if not available, please contact your Customer Success Account Manager) and select Add Product Feed.
Here, you will be presented with the opportunity to define:
Product Group Name: This is where you define the ID you wish to use for your various locales/markets (ie. USA, CAN-FR, CAN-EN)
Connection Type: URL or SFTP
SFTP Details: Host, Port, Username, Password
Product Feed URL / Path: URL / Path for specific Feed
Excluded Product Behaviour: This is where you define how Visual UGC should handle products that exist in Visual UGC but are excluded from the product feed.
Skip Status Update (default option): When this option is selected, the status of all the products that are in Visual UGC but are not in the product feed at any given point is not updated.
Mark as Out-of-Stock: When this option is selected, the status of all the products that are in Visual UGC but are not in the product feed at any given point is updated to Out-of-Stock.
Update Frequency: How often Visual UGC should poll the feed to look for changes.