Product Catalog Architecture

When catalog data passes into Attentive, the platform maps user behavior to specific catalog attributes to trigger downstream marketing actions. Here is how different sections of your data schema break out to activate features across the platform:

1. Behavior Mapping via Identifiers (Product ID & Variant ID)

• The Data: Unique identifiers differentiating parent products from their specific variations (e.g., size, color).
• Downstream Activation: On your behalf, Attentive's tracking tag captures subscriber behaviors on your website (such as product views or cart additions) using these IDs. By matching the user's behavior to the exact IDs in the catalog, Attentive accurately powers product affinity scoring, builds personalized recommendation models, and triggers specific behavioral loops. If these IDs are missing or mismatched, the tracking tag cannot link user actions to the catalog, causing triggered journeys to fail.

2. Journey Triggering via Delta Changes

The most operationally critical part of the catalog is how field state changes over time act as journey triggers. Attentive constantly evaluates the differences between your previous catalog update (Time 0) and your latest update (Time 1) to launch triggered journeys:

• Available for Purchase (Back in Stock): When a variant transitions from OUT_OF_STOCK to IN_STOCK, this status change is detected and instantly triggers a Back in Stock journey to subscribers who subscribed to that variant.
• Inventory Quantity (Low Inventory): Changes to stock counts activate Low Inventory journeys, allowing you to set custom volume thresholds that alert interested subscribers when an item is running out.
• Price Amount (Price Drop): When the system detects a downward shift in price for a variant, it triggers a Price Drop journey to subscribers who recently browsed or carted that item.

3. Dynamic Message Content Generation

• The Data: Fields like product Name, Image Link(s), and Price.
• Downstream Activation: When a Product Recommendation model or a behavioral flow selects an item to send, the system dynamically injects these exact assets into your email or SMS templates using supported macros. High data integrity here prevents user friction, ensuring subscribers never receive broken image placeholders or corrupt text.

4. Categorization & Filtering via Product Feeds

• The Data: Product Category and Tags.
• Downstream Activation: These fields are utilized to build Product Feeds, which function as rule-based filters for Attentive's recommendation engine. For example, if you want an email template to only recommend items from your clearance collection, the recommendation model relies on the Clearance tag in your catalog file to accurately serve those specific items.

What are the benefits?

• Turn-Key Marketing Automations: By maintaining real-time updates to price, stock, and availability, sophisticated revenue-generating flows like Price Drop and Back in Stock function completely hands-off.
• Automated Safeguards against Customer Friction: The system natively uses catalog metadata as an automated filter. If an item's status shifts to unavailable, it is immediately and automatically suppressed from all product recommendation models, helping ensure you never market items that customers cannot buy.
• Granular Personalization: Matching exact variant data to on-site user behavior ensures that subscribers receive hyper-targeted recommendations based on their explicit size, style, and category affinity.

How do I get started?

To ensure your catalog data can seamlessly activate these downstream features, your catalog file updates must strictly adhere to our baseline requirements:

1. Provide Full Coverage: Ensure every active product and variant available for purchase is included in your file drops. 

   Note: Be sure to mark product and variants that are no longer available to sell in your file drops as well.

2. Maintain Sync Cadence: Provide frequent, continuous updates for Inventory Quantity and Price Amount so that journeys trigger accurately and sitewide promotional pricing updates reflect correctly.
3. Validate Schema Mappings: Work with your technical team to ensure your fields correctly align with Attentive's unified schema so identifiers line up with your on-site tracking tags.