Overview

Set up analytics for your product catalog and prepare the catalog feed for integration with Unbxd. The catalog feed is a structured file that contains all your products and their associated attributes. The search engine will use it to optimize product discovery on your website. Analytics tracking allows you to measure the performance of your products, search queries, and user interactions with the catalog.

Product Catalog and Attributes

The product catalog holds all relevant information about your products. This data is critical for powering search results, filtering options, and personalized recommendations on your website. Every product in the catalog has associated attributes, which Unbxd uses to categorize and display the products in search results. Below are the key categories of attributes typically found in a catalog:

Catalog Attributes

These are common attributes that are used across most businesses to describe their products:

Attribute Name	Description
uniqueId	A unique identifier for each product in the catalog, such as SKU or productID. This is a mandatory field.
title	The name or title of the product.
price	The cost of the product.
description	A detailed description of the product.
category	The category the product belongs to.
imageUrl	The URL points to the product image.
productUrl	The URL to the product's detail page
currency	The currency in which the product price is listed.
brand	The brand name of the product.
uniqueId	The color of the product.
availability	Indicates if the product is available (true/false).

These attributes help define the characteristics of the products in the catalog and are critical to search and discovery processes. In addition to the basic attributes, many catalogs will also include feature fields and custom fields.

Catalog Fields

This refers to a specific attribute or piece of information associated with a product in the catalog. Fields represent the individual characteristics of a product that help define, categorize, and search for it within the system. Each field holds a specific type of data, such as text, numbers, or links, and is used to describe and organize products. Catalog attributes can be classified into the following categories:

UniqueId: A unique identifier (SKU, productID) for each product. It helps track sales and manage inventory. The uniqueId might not be visible to customers.
Feature Fields: Feature fields are essential for basic functionality and should be included in the catalog. Some of these fields are mandatory.

Field Name	Description	Multi-Valued	Data Type
uniqueId	Unique identifier for the product. (No special characters except `-` and `_`)	false	text
variantId	Unique identifier for a variant (if applicable)	false	text
variants	Field for holding variants of a product	true	text
title	Name or title of the product	false	text
price	Price of the product	false	decimal
description	Product description	false	longText
category	Product's main category	true	text
subCategory	Product's sub-category	true	text
categoryPath	Hierarchical category path (e.g., "Men>Shoes>Casual Shoes")	true	path
categoryPathId	Category ID mapping for catalogs with IDs	true	text
imageUrl	URL to the product image	true	link
productUrl	URL to the Product Detail Page (PDP)	false	link
currency	Currency of the product	false	text
brand	Brand of the product	true	text
color	Color of the product	true	text
availability	Availability status (true/false)	false	bool
sku	SKU (unique identifier for an item)	false	sku
gender	Gender (if applicable)	false	text
size	Size of the product	true	text
rating	Product rating	false	decimal
discount	Product discount	false	decimal
sellingPrice	Selling price of the product	false	decimal

Custom fields: This refers to attributes that are not part of the feature fields but are specific to your catalog. These fields should be included in the schema for product discovery by the search engine.
Searchable Fields: Attributes that improve search results. Searchable fields are indexed and used for queries when shoppers search for products. Only the attributes you mark as searchable will be used to display results. To modify searchable fields, navigate to Manage > Configure Search > Relevancy Ranking in the Unbxd Console.

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Note
Changes to searchable fields will be applied after the next feed indexing.

Variants

Variants are different versions of the same product that share the same SKU or productID but differ in certain attributes (e.g., color, size). These variants are treated as separate products on the search results page. Example Variants:

Illustration 1: An HDMI cable with 5 variants: color, size, gauge, quantity, and output.
Illustration 2: A product ‘Mango Badam’ with 1 variant: size.
Illustration 3: A skirt with 2 variants: color and size, with other attributes like price, description, and fabric/material remaining the same.

Best Practices for Catalog Preparation

To ensure your catalog is uploaded and integrated seamlessly, follow these best practices:

Ensure every product has a unique uniqueId.
Define all attributes in the schema (including custom fields).
Ensure the catalog file is in JSON format.
Field names are case-sensitive.
Field names should follow these rules:
- Start with an alphabet or an underscore.
- Can include alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores.
- Cannot contain special characters, spaces, or end with an underscore.
- Do not send fields that have null values.

Map Catalog Fields to Entity

During mapping a catalog field to an entity, it is recommended that you map the fields from the catalog that contains the information related to the entity. Let’s say a retailer has a title, description, and brand attribute in their catalog. The title and description attributes may contain the product's brand names for most of the products in the catalog. However, they also contain other product details, such as size, color, etc.

Hence, to get the best results for different algorithms, it is recommended to map only the brand attribute to the entity called BRAND because it would only contain information about product brands and would not have details about other product properties.

If the catalog does not have an independent attribute for an entity, leave the field mapping against the entity blank.
In such cases, it won’t influence the search results based on the detection. However, if there is an entity that is extremely important and used frequently by your shopper during search, you can go ahead and map the attribute that is closest to the entity.

Assign Weights

The weight-ages assigned to entity/fields mapped against an entity allow us to understand how important these entities/fields are for your shoppers. These weightages are used while re-ranking the search results and increasing the product count in the search results. TYPE (i.e. product type) , BRAND, COLOR are some of the entities which are found to be important for a shopper Fashion domain.

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Note
Entities without field mapping and weightage won’t be available for re-ranking results and increasing result count.

As quoted above, imagine people searching for ‘blue sofa’, get ‘blue shirt’ in their results?

It would be a terrible experience for shoppers indeed. This might happen when you rank the attributes wrong or do not rank them at all. In such a case, the search engine randomly selects products for display. Therefore,

Assign proper weights to the mapped fields:

Weight	Description
High	The first priority of attribute while searching for results.
Medium	Good to have, but not the most critical attribute.
Low	Not particularly needed, less important in results.

So, if we assign HIGH weightage to product_type while searching for blue sofa, we would get results for blue sofa and not blue shirt.

With relevant mapping and assigning weights, you provide:

Re-ranking of products: We are indirectly boosting products that you would want your customers to see above others. For example, Encouraging your brand name.

If Amazon wants to promote solimo, whenever a shopper searches for roasted brown almonds, solimo almonds would show the top results.

Improved recall: With algoritms offered by Netcore Unbxd, you get the option to abstain your site from providing zero results. So, whenever a shopper types a long tail search query that has no exact match, sites return zero results or 1-2 results.

For example, with one of the algorithms, Named Entity Recognition(NER), you could provide more products in the result set by providing a number. This means if the result set contains less than number of products then let NER increase the number of results.

For example, if a shopper searches for Bain brown boots. The result set contains 3 products. So, NER matches the query with the HIGH weightage attribute, which in this case was color and product type and provides more results on the same. More brown shoes or boots. Learn more about the different algorithms offered here.