ChannelEngine: product selection

About this article

This article describes the functionality within the Product selection page on ChannelEngine.

Table of contents

Product selections

How to use filters

Parameters and operators

Export product selection

Best practices

Product selections

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

A product selection is a set of products that follow one or more business rules. 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 its to the related marketplace – if applicable.

Without a product selection, no products are added to the product selection. Hence, it is necessary to create at least one product selection. You can add a selection as follows:

• Create product selection - create a product selection on the Product selection page.
• Copy existing selection(s) - copy existing product selection(s) from a different marketplace or from the same marketplace but from a different country. E.g.: from bol to Amazon FR; from Amazon DE to Amazon FR. 

When a selection is added, only the bare minimum is predefined. The only requirement is a name. If all rules are empty, all products are added to the selection.

You can search for a specific product selection, by typing its name in the search bar. Besides, it is possible to edit or delete existing selections on the Product selection page.

How to use filters

By using filters (a.k.a. rules), you can include or exclude certain products or ranges of products 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 brands selected, their price is greater than 70.00, and their color is red.

Parameters and operators

You can add criteria to a rule using the And operator, and make exceptions to your rules with the Or operator.

Products in the color green could be included in the example above using Or, with no other parameters (i.e.: no 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.

You can also use this option to set rules for different products. E.g.: list all products from brand X; all red items from brand Y; and all products with a price up to EUR 100.00 from brand Z. To set multiple rules for certain products, add them using And. To set different rules for different products, add separate rules using Or.

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

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 do this, 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 

Best practices

Active product selection

It is best to have products active in a single product selection. If a product is active in more than one selection and price rules are applied, the highest calculated price is exported – which might not be the desired result.

Database query performance

The rules you apply in 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 filters, such as ‘In list’, ‘Not in list’, ‘Contains any’, or ‘Does not contain any’, bear in mind that there is a limit of 2,000 items you can filter on.

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 such a product selection is not possible.

If you need to include or exclude more than 2,000 items from the product selection, consider the following options.

Use a custom attribute as a filter

1. Create a custom attribute, which can be used as a filter. E.g.: Fulfillment. Depending on your connection, do so via the web interface, product feed, or the Merchant API. For more information, check out the article ChannelEngine: custom attributes.
2. Make sure that your custom attribute has values for each product. E.g.: by merchant, by marketplace. If you use a product feed to upload your product content, map your custom attributes to the attributes from your feed. For more information, check out the article ChannelEngine: product feeds.
3. On the Product selection page, edit your product selection. Add the created custom attribute as a filter, and remove the filters that have a limit of 2,000 items. E.g.: If Fulfillment equals by merchant.
4. Click Save.