Preparing, uploading, and managing your data

Discover defines a standard set of product and category attributes. To prepare your catalog dataset, you must map your product attributes to the relevant Discover product attributes. You then create a delimited text file that contains this product data, and another file that defines your categories. You transfer your data feed file to Discover SFTP service.

For a complete list of Discover attributes for product and category, see:

If your Discover implementation requires support for cross-category recommendations, you must upload an additional feed for cross-category data.

A fitment feed consists of attributes that represent parts or accessories of third party products such as vehicles, appliances, or any other items that you do not sell, but for which you sell compatible parts or accessories.

If your products are parts or accessories that have strict compatibility mappings to third party products, you must include a fitment feed as well as a product feed. The fitment feed enables your customers to search for products (for example parts, or accessories) based on compatibility attributes with third-party products. The Discover fitment data feed specifications lists fitment attributes available by default.

Sitecore Discover gains insights into product performance and rankings based on sales data it collects over time. By uploading historical sales data at the start of your implementation, you give the learning engine a jump-start to identify patterns for bestselling and co-bought products.

In addition to this one-time sales feed during on-boarding, you can also set up a recurring feed of off-line sales.

Patterns in historical sales feed that Discover can learn from, include:

Discover can use recurring sales feed from your in-store sales, you web-only sales, or a combination of both to determine best-selling and co-bought patterns.

The Discover sales data feed specifications lists all the attributes.

You use SFTP to transfer your product, categories and sales feeds.

Sitecore Discover SFTP service polls the SFTP site for new data files every 15 minutes. The presence of a new data feed file on the SFTP site triggers a process whereby the new dataset is queued for transfer into the Discover system. The actual transfer of data into Discover is subject to system resources availability.

After the initial data feed, it is critical that you keep Discover up-to-date with your latest catalog information, including new products and removed products. You use the full product feed to add new products. You can also use the full product feed to remove product.

You can set up a recurring data transfer to the SFTP site or transfer new data files on an as-needed basis. You do not have control over the moment that Discover chooses to process the data you send to the SFTP site. If you have a requirement for Discover to process your data at specific times, inform your Sitecore integration specialist.

You can monitor the status of your recurring data feeds in the Customer Engagement Console.

The full data feeds refreshes your entire product dataset and allows Discover to recognize new products added and removed products since the last full feed run. Between each full feed runs, you might have to make near real-time updates to some attributes of existing products in Discover. The Discover Incremental Feed API lets you update existing product attributes in Discover, as these changes occur in your systems of records. For example, you might have to update product availability, inventory or pricing information on your e-commerce site.