Create and update product data

Product data are imported in CSV UTF-8 format. You have two options for creating product data:

• Edit Excel template

• Edit CSV template

You will also find the following topics in this article:

• Update product data

• Add product image URLs

• Show product information as a list

• Format specifications

Edit Excel template and save as CSV file

1. Download one of the following Excel templates:

📁 Excel template with macros for validating and creating a CSV file: DOWNLOAD HERE

2. Open the template with Excel.

3. Per row, add the desired recommendation unit (e.g. systems, products, articles, etc.).

💡A recommendation unit is the unit that you present to your customers on the result page. A unit is, for example, a system (consisting of several components), a product or an article.

4. For each row, add an individual ID (e.g. article numbers) to the ID column.

5. Enter the name of the recommendation unit in the productName column.

6. Enter one column per attribute. Please refer to the Explanations tab in the Excel templates.

7. Click on File > Save as and save the file in CSV UTF-8 format.

⚠️ Do not edit CSV files with Excel

You should not open and edit files in CSV format directly with Excel, as formatting errors may occur when saving due to incorrect decoding. For example, ä is displayed as ä. This is because Microsoft Excel does not check the Unicode character set of CSV files and instead assumes without checking that the content of a CSV file corresponds to a Windows-specific character set (Windows-1252).

Edit CSV template

You can also work directly with the CSV format instead of the Excel template.

1. Download and install LibreOffice on your computer or laptop.

2. Download the following CSV template:

📁 CSV-Template: DOWNLOAD

3. Open the template with LibreOffice.

4. Per row, add the desired recommendation unit (e.g. systems, products, articles, etc.).

💡A recommendation unit is the unit that you present to your customers on the result page. A unit is, for example, a system (consisting of several components), a product or an article.

4. Add an individual ID (e.g. article numbers) to the ID column for each row.

5. Enter the name of the recommendation unit in the productName column.

6. Enter one column per attribute.

7. Save the file.

Update and delete product data

Update product data directly in your data file (Excel or CSV) and then import the new file. When updating your product data, make sure that each recommendation unit always retains the same ID. The ID of the products is linked to the insights tracking and the values of the matrix.

1. Open the Excel file.

2. Update the contents of the rows and columns without changing the ID of the products.

3. When deleting recommendation units, select the entire row and remove it completely from the file. Do not re-assign the ID of the deleted recommendation unit.

4. Save the file in CSV UTF-8 format.

5. Import the updated file into the workbench.

Store product image URLs

To add images to your product data for displaying the recommendations on the result page, carry out the following steps:

1. Enter a column with the title picture in your product file.

2. Per row, insert one image URL (example: https://cdn.foxbase.de/f/Selector/Farben/2.1.jpg)

3. Save the file in CSV UTF-8 format.

💡Make sure to use image URLs from publicly accessible servers. The platform cannot display images on the result page that are located on your server behind a login.

Show product information as a list

The contents of the CSV columns can be imported and read with cleanly formatted HTML code . This allows you to display product information on the result page as a list.

1. Add a new column to your product file (e.g. "benefits").

2. For a list of key points, copy the following code:
   

   <ul><li>Text 1</li><li>Text 2</li><li>Text 3</li></ul>

   
   For a numbered list, copy the following code:
   

   <ol><li>Text 1</li><li>Text 2</li><li>Text 3</li></ol>

3. Paste the code per recommendation unit (i.e. in each row) into the new column.

4. Enter the desired list content for text 1, text 2 and text 3.

💡Tips

• Not in the mood for manual typing? Use the Excel concatenation formula to automatically transfer content into html format.

• To insert a paragraph in your product data, use the following code: <br>

Format specifications

• All content for recommendations that you want to display on the result page must be imported in a file.

• Each ID is only assigned once.

• Do not use spaces or umlauts for the column names.

• Do not use special characters (hyphens and underscores are allowed).

• Make sure that each column contains an individual title.

• Do not use titles with more than 64 characters.

• Avoid columns without titles.

• Avoid empty rows.

• Use periods as decimal separators for numbers.