Catalogs

A Catalog is a lookup table with one primary key item_id that can be used in various ways. E-commerce websites typically use catalogs to store products and related information. Publishing businesses use catalogs for their articles and section details.

Watch this short introductory video about catalogs in Bloomreach Engagement.

To see your catalogs, go to Data & Assets > Catalogs.

To import a new catalog, follow the guide to imports.

Catalog types

There are 2 types of catalogs in Bloomreach Engagement:

• General catalog: This type of catalog can serve as a generic lookup table for your project. item_id is the only required column as the primary key. There are no further predefined IDs.
• Product catalog: Product catalogs are designed to store information about your products. They have a specific data structure that helps Bloomreach Engagement identify the most important information that will be used for recommendations, inventory management, and stock level calculation.

You can define your catalog type during the first import.

Recommended product catalog columns

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Important

Catalogs that have not been used in the previous 90 days (that is, no access from app or UI and no import) will be automatically deleted. All respective scenarios will remain editable. This change will be introduced on April 4, 2023. On that day, all catalogs unused since January 1, 2023 will be deleted.

Import a catalog

Read our guide to imports to learn how to import your catalog.

Download a catalog

Downloading and exporting catalogs is not possible.

Personally identifiable information

Catalogs should never contain personally identifiable information (PII) such as emails or phone numbers.

Limitations

We encourage fair usage of catalogs with the following limits:

• Max number of catalogs per project: 50
• Max number of items within one catalog: 6,000,000

Show a weblayer with the last visited product on the homepage

Requirements

• Catalog with required columns (item_id, picture_url, link_url, price, available).
• Event tracking (Track event view_item on every page visit of a product page. Track with property item_id that matches the item_id in the product catalog)

Design a new weblayer to show an item based on the last viewed item. Create an aggregate to get last(view_item) 'item_id'. In personalization, find your aggregate and use it in catalog lookup personalization.

{% set item = catalogs.products.item_by_id(aggregates['586e0b8d830434e7cc369263']) %}

To check if an item is available and print values from the catalog:

{% if item and item.available == "true" %}
    {{ item.picture_url }}
    {{ item.link_url }}
    {{ item.price }}
{% endif %}

Recommendations

A catalog is required when using a recommendation engine. The resulting recommendations will be presented in a list of item_ids. To use these recommendations in an email or web layer you can use a catalog lookup as in the example below.

<ul id="recommendations">
  {% for item in recommendations['58aee25afb6009bfe0852332'][:8] %}
  <li> <a href="{{ item.link_url }}">{{ item.title }}</a> </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>