How to optimize your Datafeed

Mandatory Fields

FactFinder currently has only one real mandatory field. It is theoretically possible to create a feed with only this field. However, this is of course not useful in practice.

ProductID* or article number* 

A unique ID is entered here, e.g. the article numbers of your products.

The ProductID or Article Number field should be the first field in your export. The field should be named with one of the following names: Artikelnummer, ArtikelNr, ArticleNumber, ProduktNummer, ProductNumber. 

Recommended Fields

Recommended fields contain information that is not essential for the operation of FactFinder, but whose use we nevertheless strongly recommend.

Master article number

If your products have variants (colour variations, size variations, etc.), it is necessary to include the master article number. This way it can be ensured that only one variation is displayed per variation group. This is crucial for deduplication of the results. 

Beispiel

 An item of clothing, e.g. a sweater, is available in different colors and sizes. 

If then sweaters are searched for, a certain article is shown only once in the result. Information about color and size can then be displayed below the result, for example. 

If your product inventory contains a mix of products without variants and products with variants, the master article number field must always be filled anyway. Simply fill the master article number field of the products without variations with the article number of the product. 

The same rules apply to the naming of the master article number field which apply to the normal article number field, but master should be prefixed to the name. 

Product name

The product name is an important field for the search. 

There should be a short, concise statement about the product itself here. What is the product itself: generic description e.g. Low sodium water, textile, TV. 

Brand name; bottle; 0.7 liter; mineral water; low sodium; natural additives. 

Brand name; organic cotton cable knit sweater. 

Brand name; OLED TV 70 inch. 

More information about color, size, material composition and other attributes can then be collected in the filter attributes. 

The field should have the field name Name, Title or Titel

Price 

The valid price for the product.

This data field is important e.g. for price filters or price sliders. The same format must be followed as described for "Filter attributes". 

The character "dot" must be used as decimal point. There must not be a thousands separator. 

Example: 3456.99

All number fields must comply with this specification!

  If there are several prices, we recommend to use separate fields for them. e.g.: Price_EUR; Price_US or Price_Dealer; Price_Final_Customer or Price_Discount_Level1, Price_Discount_Level2 etc. The field should not contain currency symbols and must use the dot "." as a decimal separator throughout. 

Example: |EUR=32.34|USD=40.32|GBP=23.54|

As also described in "Filter Attributes", the unit - in this case the currency sign - can be included.

Example: |EUR~~€=32.34|USD~~$=40.32|GBP~~£=23.54| 

This character will be used later when displaying the values. 

The field name should contain Price or Preis.

Optional Fields

Optional fields contain information that adds value to some setups, but is not universally recommended.

Short description 

A short concise description of the product. Short descriptions are more likely to contain terms more relevant to the search than the (full) description (see below). This field is very interesting if the searching customer does not know the manufacturer or the exact product name, for example. 

When naming the field, the same rules apply as for the long description (see next point), additionally either short or kurz should be included in the name. 

Long description

This is the extensive marketing description of the product. Since it contains many terms that have nothing to do with the product itself, we recommend not making this field searchable, but FactFinder can take this into account using a special weighting. 

The field name should contain Beschreibung or Description. 

Manufacturer 

It is a good idea to export the manufacturer (or brand) of the products. This information is often used by store visitors to narrow down the search results, e.g. brand filters. Another very important option is ranking by manufacturer (brand) e.g. to push own brands. 

Use Marke, Hersteller, Manufacturer or Brand as field name. 

Filter attributes 

If other attributes are available, they can also be used for the search. For a music store, for example, this would be artist and genre, for a clothing store perhaps color and size. 

If you maintain attributes for your products that differ from product type to product type, it does not make sense to create a separate field for each possible attribute. 

Alternatively, you can create a Multi-Attribute-Field:


Multi-attribute fields follow this pattern: 

|attribute1=value|attribute2=value|attribute3=value| 

Please note that the separator character (|) must appear between attributes as well as at the beginning and end of the field content. Please also note that the characters | # ~ and = are reserved in attribute fields and must not appear in the data itself. 

Example: 

a hard disk has the attributes "capacity" and "speed". The content of the attribute field would look like this: 

|Capacity=50|Speed=7200| 

If there are attributes in your data that have multiple values, the attribute must be stored multiple times in the field. 

If there are several values for a filter (e.g. colors or sizes), they can be strung together by using the # sign. 

Alternatively, the filters can also be written completely one after the other. 

The first variant with the #-sign offers here however more clarity. 

Example variant 1: 

|Color=Red#Yellow#Blue| 

Example variant 2: 

|Color=Red|Color=Yellow|Color=Blue| 

FactFinder would internally automatically split the filter, of variant 1, into: "Color=Red|Color=Yellow|Color=Blue". 

The # sign may only be used in a multi-attribute field for the above mentioned separation of multiple values! 

For some attributes it may also be useful to specify a unit. For this purpose, please separate the attribute name and the unit with double tilde (~). Please note, however, that there can be only one unit per attribute name (even if the attributes appear in different data sets), the values should therefore be normalized beforehand. 

 Example: 

|Capacity~~GB=50|Connection types=SCSI|Connection types=SATA| 

A multi-attribute field is treated as a "text field" due to the field content. For later use in your filter display in the store, you can assign an individual data type such as text, integer or decimal number to each individual attribute. Depending on the data type, different display formats can be selected for the filter. 

If you have many different attributes, it is a good idea to divide them into separate fields in the data feed according to the subsequent display format in the store (text, number, single or multi-select, slider, etc.). 

The field name should contain Attribute or MultiAttribute and in case of splitting the data type e.g. text or numerical or the purpose slider. 


Note: If you want to use different units of measurement (e.g. g and kg) for the same attribute please use a native field and the property data type for this attribute (see: point 9.9).  A multi-attribute field supports only one unit of measurement per attribute. 

Search attributes 

If a product already has a clear designation (product name), additional search terms - technical terms - keywords can be used for a better search. These describe the search term - technical term - keyword in more detail.


The search attributes should be separated by a single consistent character. 

Example: Search for music CD: Artist: GENESIS Search attributes: ARTROCK POP COLLINS AIR 


Category

The categories are usually very meaningful for the products, which is why they are of course also of immense importance for the search. In particular, the categories are excellent for displaying them as filters. 


If the field names are formed using category name and number, such as in the previous example, these category paths are also automatically recognized and set by the installer, and each field is assigned to the appropriate category. 

If the products are assigned to several category paths, there is on the one hand the possibility to export the data set per path, which however can quickly lead to a large amount of data. On the other hand, there is the possibility to transfer the paths in a so-called category path field. The individual paths and category levels are distinguished here by separators, for category levels slash (/) and category paths pipe (|) is used. Because these characters can also occur in category names, you must pass the values UTF-8 URL encoded. Thus, a "%" character must also be UTF-8 URL encoded. 

Example: 

A product is assigned to the paths "bicycle/lighting" and "accessories/bicycle lamps". This structure would result in the following field contents: 

CategoryPath 

Bicycle/Lighting|Accessory%C3%B6r/Bicycle Lamps 

The field names of the category fields should include Category or Kategorie.

 Sales rank 

If your store system determines a sales rank, it would be a good idea to export it as well. FactFinder can then refer to it in the search and thus create a better result sorting and place the best results at the front. 


Do not use a thousands separator for numerical values, but always work with (.) as decimal separator. 

Example:  3456.99 

Availability 

If a deliverability characteristic is present, this can also be included in the calculation of the similarity value. Thus, unavailable items are displayed further down in the results or, if desired, not at all. 

Margin 

It can be useful to control the ranking of the products according to the achievable margin. If the store system can determine and transfer these values, the ranking could be aligned with them.

The margin does not always have to be passed in real numerical values, but can also be specified in clustered form. 

Example: 

0-5% = a 

6-10% = b usw. 

Do not use a thousands separator for numerical values, but always work with (.) as decimal separator. 

Example:  3456.99 

ISBN, EAN, GTIN 

The ISBN or EAN or its successor GTIN can be used (like the article number) as a unique article identifier, i.e. exactly this title or exactly this article is displayed. 


The field should be named GTIN, EAN or ISBN. 

The following formats are supported by FactFinder. ISSN-8, ISBN-10, ISMN-10, ISSN-13, ISMN-13, and ISBN-13.  

The link to the product detail page in the online store. Using a data field deeplink, the store visitor would be redirected from a search results page or a suggestion page exactly to the product detail page. 


You should name the field Deeplink, ProduktURL or ProductURL. 

Example:   www.exampleshop.de/picture/article/123 

ImageURL 

The link to the product image

Important: This is the preview image for the search result. Not the high-resolution image that is displayed on the product detail page. 

In case there is no image available at the moment, a dummy URL with the same name or the link to an image that shows "no image for this item yet" should be used here.


We do not recommend leaving this field blank. 

This is especially important for ranking. If articles that do not yet have an associated image should not be displayed, e.g. in Suggest. 

Please name the field with one of the following names: ImageURL, ImgURL, BildURL, BildLink, PictureURL, PicURL. 

Example:  www.exampleshop.de/picture/brand/bild.jpg 

Accessory

This field allows for better identification and ranking of accessories.


The indicator that this product is an accessory can be set, for example, with a True-False indicator e.g. 0/1. 

Name the field with one of the following names: Zubehör, accessory 

Promotion/Sale 

This field is interesting if older articles are to be sold off or if a major promotion is currently being advertised. 

Articles are then displayed in the sales/promotion areas on the basis of an indicator. 

Name the field with one of the following names: Sale, Aktion 

BrandURL 

The content of the field can be used to direct the store visitor to a brand store with a URL 

Name this field BrandURL 

BrandImage 

This field would be displayed to the store visitor as a return value in the Suggest or when selecting the Brand/Brand filters as an ASN preview image. 

Example:  www.exampleshop.de/picture/brand/bild.jpg 

Name this field: BrandImage 

Stock

If a stock is slowly running out, this field can devalue the item to the point that it is displayed far down the list or (if the stock is zero) not at all. 

Name the field with one of the following names: Quantity, StockQuantity, Stock, StockStatus 

Rating 

This field can be used as a return value and for filtering ratings. 

Usually in the manner of 1 - 5 stars. The value can then either be displayed in the Suggest or you can use it to filter on x stars. 

Use this data field only in conjunction with RatingCount, this field contains the rating count information; see RatingCount (below). 
Name the field with one of the following names: RatingScore, Rating 

RatingCount 

Integer value indicating the number of ratings; see Rating (above). 

Name this field: RatingCount 

Saison / Event 

This field can devalue items that are not currently in season or that do not belong to a particular event so that they are displayed far down in the search or not at all. 

Name the field with one of the following names: Saison, Event 

Return rate 

If the store system can provide this data, the return rate can be used to devalue the items with a high rate. 

Name the field with one of the following names: Retour, RetourCount, ReturnData 


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