Importing your product data feed into alby

The Product Catalog is a collection of products in your inventory and includes information on those products, such as prices, images, URLs, created date, and other attributes. This information is used within alby to generate questions and product recommendations.

You can import either your full product feed, replacing all items in your alby catalog, or a delta feed to only target certain products.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have set up an SFTP connection with alby. See this article.

After successfully establishing an SFTP connection, verify that a folder named feeds exists. If it does not exist, create the folder with the exact naming. You must place the CSV file in this folder for the review import process to activate.

File Structure

There are two concepts of products within alby: product variants and their parent product.

Product variants represent the different versions of a single item, each identified by a unique External ID (external_id). For instance, a shirt available in red, green, and blue colors will have three distinct variants, each with its own External ID.

The parent product, distinguished by an Item Group ID (item_group_id), serves as the overarching identifier for the item. Using the previous example, the shirt in all its color options is considered one parent product.

This structure establishes a hierarchical relationship where one parent product encompasses multiple variants.

Importing guidelines

Product feeds sent to alby must include a header row for each column in the file followed by the specific detail records that should be imported by alby.

Each row in your CSV file represents a variant, identified by an External ID (external_id). These variants are grouped using an Item Group ID (item_group_id).

Delta feeds

Instead of uploading your full catalog every time you update your product feed, you can also upload a partial product feed to update specific products in your alby catalog.

Unlike full feeds which replace your complete catalog, partial feeds let you make targeted updates to selected products only.

Some possible reasons for using a partial product feed instead of a full feed include:

• Sending only new products without affecting existing ones in your catalog.
• Saving on processing time for product updates, especially if you have a large catalog.
• Updating prices for specific products.
• Deactivating out-of-stock items.
• Activating or deactivating seasonal merchandise.

Use a full feed upload for the following reasons:

• Complete catalog refresh when making significant changes across your entire product line.
• Initial catalog setup when first integrating with alby.
• Seasonal catalog overhauls where most products change simultaneously.
• After migrating from another e-commerce platform with different product structures.

When you create the delta file, add a new column for a status field for each product variant. This field accepts two values:

• active
  • Keeps the product live
• inactive
  • Deactivates the product from the catalog

The alby system will automatically detect the file as a delta file based on the presence of the status field. Only the products included in the feed will be updated. All other products will remain unchanged in your catalog.

When updating a product with multiple variants, include all variants of that product, not just the ones you’re changing.

Product variants can be activated and deactivated as part of the same partial feed. For example, you can update an item’s price and deactivate it in the same file, or activate some products but deactivate others.

Example filename

Brand_ProductCatalog_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.csv

alby requires following the above example for product feeds.

CSV file requirements

alby will attempt to auto-detect and use the appropriate delimiter, it is advisable to use the standard comma delimiter.

Required columns

You can view a sample file here. The sample file includes a ReadMe and examples for both a full and partial feed.