Overview

A catalog provides the ability to personalize campaigns with dynamic information in messages from product prices to inventory levels. You can create a new catalog by uploading a file with one row for each item in your catalog. A catalog can be uploaded directly on the CleverTap dashboard via a CSV file that is generated by your inventory management system on your servers.

Download a Sample Catalog

To download a sample catalog, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Catalogs.
2. Click on the Sample Product Location csv or Sample Product csv link.

The file samples can help you get started in creating your own catalog.

In a product location catalog, the identity represents a location ID. Below is a product location catalog sample:

Below is a product catalog sample:

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Mandatory Fields

Please note the mandatory fields for each catalog type:

• Product location: identity, latitude, and longitude.
• Product: Identity, Name, and ImageURL.

Create a New Catalog

To create a new catalog, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Catalogs.
2. Click + Catalog.
3. Select Product or Product Location.

4. 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 a million rows from our API. For more information, refer to Catalog API.

3. Once the catalog preview displays, enter a catalog name.
4. Click Upload.

5. Click Save Catalog.

Your new catalog is now displayed on the catalog page.

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Maximums and Other Considerations

Some things to keep in mind:

• The catalog file must be in a CSV format.
• You can add a maximum of 20 columns in a catalog.

For a product catalog:

• You can upload a maximum of five catalogs.
• Each catalog can have up to 5 million rows.

For a product location catalog:

• You can upload a maximum of five catalogs.
• Each catalog can have up to 1 million rows.

Map Catalog Columns

After uploading the catalog, you must map the catalog column with the associated event and property on CleverTap (i.e., 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.

Below is a product location catalog mapping sample where the identity column from the catalog needs to 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 stating the item location to map 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.

Below is a product catalog mapping sample:

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Product Catalog Considerations

Some things to consider:

• You can map more than one column of the catalog to a CleverTap event property.
• A mapped event property can only belong to the same event.

3. Once the mapping is complete, click Save Catalog.

Catalog Best Practices

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

Mandatory

The following are mandatory items:

• The first row in your 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 are three mandatory columns for each catalog type.

For a product catalog:

• Identity: This is the unique identifier associated with each item.
• Name: This is the name of the item.
• ImageURL: This is the item image.

For a product location catalog:

• Identity: This is the location ID such as a store ID.

• Latitude: This is the geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position.

• Longitude: This is the geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position.

• There can be a total of 20 columns in your catalog. Some tangible benefits to adding a large number of custom fields while uploading your catalog include:

  • 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 items 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 choose to exclude certain items that are not best suited to be recommended to a wider audience (e.g. rated content).

• The catalog must be in a CSV format.

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

  • In-app aspect ratio.
  • Others: The aspect ratio of images must be 16: 9 or 1:1 depending on your campaign requirement.

Recommended

The following are recommended items:

• 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.