Overview

With rapidly changing customer preferences in real-time, recommendation engines become very crucial for growth marketers to deliver the most relevant recommendations or suggestions to their customers. You can achieve this with the help of CleverTap's Catalogs feature. A Catalog provides the ability to send personalized recommendations using catalogs from the CleverTap dashboard. It includes details, such as product names, descriptions, prices, images, and other relevant attributes. Using catalogs, you can send campaigns with dynamic information in messages from product prices to inventory levels. You can upload a catalog directly to the CleverTap dashboard via a CSV file that is generated by your inventory management system on your servers.

The following are two types of catalogs you can upload:

• Product Catalog
• Product Location Catalog

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Note

If your inventory/stock is highly dynamic, updates even more than once a day, then you must use Linked Content feature to fetch the data in real-time.

Download a Sample Catalog

Before you upload your catalog to the CleverTap dashboard, it is good practice to download a sample catalog. This helps ensure that your data aligns with the platform's requirements, avoids common mistakes, and optimizes the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. To download a sample catalog:

1. Navigate to Settings > Catalogs.
2. Click Sample Product csv or Sample Product Location csv links depending on your requirement.

The sample files help you get started with creating your catalog.

• Product Location Catalog: In this type of catalog, the identity represents the location ID. The following is the sample product location catalog:

• Product Catalog: In this type of catalog, identity column uniquely identifies the product. For example, for an e-commerce business, the SKU ID of the product can be included under this column. The following are the mandatory fields for the product catalog: Identity, Name, and ImageURL. The following is the sample product catalog:

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ImageURL in Catalogs

CleverTap's Catalogs feature supports HTTPS images only.

Create a New Catalog

After you have the catalog ready, you can upload it to the dashboard. To do so:

1. Navigate to Settings > Catalogs and click + Catalog.
2. Select Product or Product Location.

3. Click Browse to search and upload a new catalog. The catalog file must be in a CSV format.

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Upload Limit

• You can insert up to 10,000 rows from the dashboard; however, you can insert up to 5 million rows from our API. For more information, refer to Catalog API.
• For Product Catalog, you can upload a maximum of five catalogs. Each catalog can have up to five million rows.
• For Product Location Catalog, you can upload a maximum of five catalogs. Each catalog can have up to one million rows.

4. Enter the Catalog name after the Catalog preview popup opens.
5. Click Upload.

Uploading a catalog may take some time. Once the file is uploaded, the status is updated next to the file name.

6. Click Map to map catalog columns to the associated property on the CleverTap dashboard.
7. Click Save Catalog.

The new catalog is now displayed on the Catalogs page.

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Key Points to Consider

• You can add a maximum of 20 columns in a catalog.

• You can upload the catalog with columns having accent marks and emojis, but you cannot view these characters at the time of catalog send-time personalization or downloading the catalog.

Map Catalog Columns

After uploading the catalog, you must map the catalog column with the associated event and property on CleverTap (for example, map the Name field of the catalog to the event property Product Name of the event Product Viewed).

1. Navigate to Settings > Catalogs and select the uploaded catalog.
2. From the map catalog section, select the catalog columns to map.

The following is the sample mapping of the Product Location Catalog where the identity column from the catalog must be mapped to any other column in any product catalog:

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Required Location Column in a Product Catalog

A product catalog must have a specific field that can be mapped to the identity column in a product location catalog. Also, there can be multiple mappings that can be done with the same product location catalog.

The following is the sample mapping for the Product Catalog:

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Key Points to Consider for Product Catalog

• You can map multiple catalog columns to a CleverTap event property.
• A mapped event property can only belong to the same event.

3. Click Save Catalog after the mapping is complete.

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Catalog Column Mapping

When mapping catalog columns, both user and event properties are always interpreted as String values, regardless of the provided data type.

Supported Channels

This section provides information about the messaging channels that support Catalog Send-Time Personalization:

• Push Notification
• SMS
• Email
• WhatsApp
• Web Inbox
• Web Push
• Webhooks

Catalog Best Practices

When uploading a catalog, consider the following best practices: some items are mandatory, and others are recommendations.

Mandatory Practices

The following are some of the mandatory practices when working with Catalogs on the CleverTap dashboard:

• The first row in the file must contain the header fields separated by commas. The subsequent rows are fields with your individual catalog items in them, also separated by commas. Each row identifies one item in your catalog.

• There can be a total of 20 columns in your catalog. The following are some tangible benefits of adding a large number of custom fields when uploading your record:

  • Every field in the catalog can be used for sending personalized messages to your users.
  • Also, every field could be used to create recommendations for a filtered set of items in your catalog. For example, you could have a field that identifies the things that are the flavor of the season.
  • You could create a recommendation to serve only the flavor of the season from the catalog. You could also exclude items that are not best suited to be recommended to a wider audience (for example, rated content).

• The images added within the ImageURL field must adhere to the following guidelines to render correctly:

  • Aspect Ratio for In-App Campaigns.
  • Others: The aspect ratio of images must be 16: 9 or 1:1, depending on your campaign requirement.

Recommended Practices

The following are recommended practices:

• You can add custom fields in addition to the mandatory fields.
• It is highly recommended that you keep your catalog updated to ensure that:
  • The recommendations are accurate and useful to users. Also, it is important to avoid showing recommendations for items that have expired or are currently out of stock.
  • The Catalog Data Ingestion is accurate.