Add products to your product catalog

Dotdigital's EasyEditor features product blocks that can be dragged and dropped into campaigns, allowing you to showcase, promote and sell your products. In order for products to be available for selection in a product block, you need to add them to your account's Insight data.

To create a new catalog in Insight data call the Creates an Insight data collection call with the following parameters.

  • The collection name must be prefixed with catalog_
  • The collection type set to catalog
  • The collection scope set to account

It's also compulsory to feature the following five keys for a product (check out the full product schema):

  • the name of the product
  • the stock keeping unit (sku) of the product
  • the price of the product
  • the URL for the product in your online store; recipients will be taken here when clicking on the product
  • the image path of the product that will be used in the product block

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Ensure you get the Insight collection details correct

If the requirements above aren't observed then products added in this way won't be available for selection in product blocks.

Products can be added to an account's Insight data using our Insight data API using several different calls. We would always recommend that where possible product data is imported to Dotdigital in bulk using our bulk import call, but if only an infrequent update of a small amount of data is required then individual calls using this call to upsert a record into your account scoped catalog Insight data collection.

Here's an example of what a product's structure could look like in JSON form:

{ 
  "name": "Plaid Cotton Shirt-Royal Blue-L", 
  "short_description": "This everyday shirt is equally stylish with jeans or trousers.", 
  "sku": "msj006c-Royal Blue-L", 
  "price": 160, 
  "department": "menswear", 
  "url": "https://www.mywebsite.com/store/department/menswear/shirts/id=00001/plaid-cotton-shirt-royal-blue-l/", 
  "image_path": "https://www.mywebsite.com/store/media/id=00001/plaid-cotton-shirt-royal-blue.jpg"
}

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A word of warning on non-HTTPS images

Please be mindful about serving non-HTTPS product images in your campaign. Over recent years, webmail services such as Gmail and Outlook.com have defaulted to SSL when users log in. This means images served over HTTP represent a non-secure source and as such the email will cause a warning when viewed in recipient browsers. In which case, we advise serving only HTTPS images.