ChannelEngine: product selection

About this article

This article describes the Product selection step on ChannelEngine.

Table of contents

Introduction

Overview

Add a product selection

Advanced rules

Export product selection

Best practices

Introduction

When you add a marketplace on ChannelEngine, your active products are not automatically exported to the marketplace. This is intentional because, in many cases, ChannelEngine customers do not want all of their products listed on every marketplace. To have products included from your product feed and exported to your marketplaces, they must first be included in a product selection on ChannelEngine.

A product selection is a set of products that follow one or more business rules (e.g.: clothing type or brand). It is possible to create these business rules by using all the specifications loaded into ChannelEngine via the product feed. If a product is included in a selection, ChannelEngine updates its price and stock and exports it to the related marketplace.

Without setting up a product selection on ChannelEngine, no products are added to the marketplace. Hence, it is necessary to create at least one product selection. 

Overview

Within a given marketplace on ChannelEngine, navigate to the product selection step. On the Product selection page, you see a list of all product selections that you created for this marketplace.

Each product selection is sorted by status across three different tabs: Active, Inactive, and Archived.

• Active - active product selections are live on the marketplace.
• Inactive - inactive product selections are not yet live on the marketplace. This is the case if you are still working on the product selection.
• Archived - archived product selections are products that reached their valid end date or were manually archived.

On each product selection line item, you see the product selection's Name, Type, number of active Products in the selection, Description, start and end dates, Created date, and last modified date. By default, the number of active products is zero in inactive and archived product selections.

For each product selection in the list, you can perform the following actions:

• Edit - by clicking the edit icon, you can edit the items that you include in the given product selection. 
• Copy - by clicking the copy icon, you can create a copy of the product selection on the same channel. The copy appears as a new line item in the product selection list after a short delay. 
• Download - locally download the product selection as a CSV file. 

Add a product selection

You can create a product selection on the given marketplace from scratch or copy an existing product selection from a different marketplace. Additionally, it is possible to copy a product selection from the same marketplace but from a different country, e.g.: from Amazon DE to Amazon FR. 

To create a new product selection:

1. On the Product selection page, click Create product selection.

   

2. On the editing page, define the rules to include and/or exclude products. To learn more, check out the How to use filters section.
   

3. Add a comment to describe the entire rule set. E.g.: include products whose name contains ‘T-shirt’. Use the comment box to align your internal teams on the context around the rule(s) that you set.

4. Enter a name that clearly describes the products or brand in the selection, e.g.: Basic T-shirts.

5. Select whether the product selection should be included in the marketplace listing by selecting its Type. This can only be set when creating the product selection. 

   1. Include - include the selected products in the listing.

6. Exclude - exclude the selected products from the listing, e.g.: if there is a price discount on a product line that should not appear on the given marketplace.

7. Choose whether the product selection should already be active on the marketplace.

8. Optionally, set a start and end date for the product selection to define when the product selection becomes active and when it becomes inactive. If no start date is set, the product selection becomes active as soon as you create it. If an end date is set, ChannelEngine automatically sends the product selection to the Archive tab on the end date.

9. Click Save selection to finalize the creation of your product selection.

Advanced rules

By using advanced rules, you can include or exclude certain products or product ranges from your product selection.

For example, you can include or exclude brands or products that are cheaper or more expensive than a set amount. Products are only included in the selection when they meet all the criteria set in the rule. You can add as many criteria as you like. 

The example above shows a simple filter. Products are only sent to the marketplace if they belong to one of the selected brands, their price is greater than 10, and their supplier is equal to 'CN'.

Filter rule comments

Further align your internal teams by leaving a comment next to each filter rule. 

To add a comment next to your filter rule, click on the comment bubble at the end of the filter rule line item. When you are done editing the comment, click Close to save the comment. When the comment is saved, three dots will appear in the comment bubble. 

To leave a comment to describe your entire ruleset, enter a comment in Add comment, at the bottom of each ruleset section. 

Parameters and conditions

You can add criteria to a rule using the +And and +Or conditions.

 A condition with no parameters

Products in the color green could be included in the example above using +Or with no other brand or price requirements. This way, all green products uploaded would be listed – even if their price was below EUR 70.00 and their brand was different from the initial rule in the example.

Combining conditions with parameters

You can also use this option to set rules for different products. 

• List all products from Brand X; all red items from Brand Y
• All products with a price of up to EUR 100,00 from Brand Z. 

Operators

The operators (EQUALS, CONTAINS, etc.) for each condition are grouped into two types: text and arithmetic, depending on the attribute you select.

• If you select a text attribute (an attribute that contains words or letters, such as Brand), you can choose from text operators like 'Is equal to'. E.g.: Brand is equal to Nike.
• If you select an attribute that displays a numeric value, such as Price, you can use arithmetic operators like 'Greater than'. E.g.: Price is greater than 70.

In some cases, text operators may be available for numeric fields if appropriate e.g.: GTIN. The filter options automatically adjust based on the selected attribute, ensuring only relevant operators are displayed.

You can change these advanced rules at any time, making it easy to exclude certain products when your competition offers lower prices or include products when others are out of stock.

Database performance

The rules that you apply in the product selection are translated into database queries. Using long lists of included or excluded unique identifiers (e.g.: over 100 Merchant product numbers or GTINs) can slow down database queries. Instead, filter by common identifiers, such as brand or price, to improve performance.

Filtering limits

When using specific filters within advanced rules: In list, Not in list, Contains any, or Does not contain any, bear in mind that there is a limit of 2,000 items that can be included in these filters.

In the example below, the list of merchant product numbers to exclude from the product selection contains over 4,000 values. Therefore, creating or updating a product selection with this filter is not possible.

If you need to include or exclude more than 2,000 items from the product selection, consider creating a custom field.

Create a custom field for filtering

1. Create a custom field, e.g.: Fulfillment, to use within an advanced rule. For guidance on creating custom fields, check out the article ChannelEngine: custom fields.
2. Make sure that your custom field has values for each product. If using a product feed to provide the values for your custom field, check that your custom field is mapped correctly in Product feeds. For guidance on product feed mapping, check out the article ChannelEngine: product feeds.
3. In the Product selection step, click the edit icon on your product selection. Add an advanced rule that filters on your custom field, e.g.: If Fulfillment equals by merchant.
4. Remove the other filters that exceed a limit of 2,000 items.
5. Click Save.

Export product selection

You might want to export a snapshot of the product data in a product selection so that you can review the data or do some further analysis.

To export a product selection as a CSV file, complete the following steps:

1. Add a product selection. When you add the product selection, an Export button is shown on the Product page.
2. Click Export.
   
3. Select an export option from the dropdown list (CSV or CSV for import into Excel).
4. Click Export.

ChannelEngine sends a CSV file that includes the current product data to your login email address. To download the CSV file, click download link in the email. For each product, the file contains applicable data, such as the:

• Merchant product number
• GTIN
• Product name
• Product type