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Customer Engagement holds an internal article register for each tenant, containing all the articles (purchasable items) in the client’s system. The article register is used to enrich data within Customer Engagement like transactions and products of interest. The register can be created and updated in two ways:
  • Using a product feed to populate the register
  • Using sources like XML files from a PIM or ERP system
The line-items on a contact’s transaction represent articles. By connecting these to the product data for those articles, you can more precisely segment and analyze a contact’s shopping behavior.
The more data you have about a product, the more you know about the person who bought it.

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Article vs product

There is a difference between products (used for communication) and articles (used for data enrichment). These represent two separate functions and areas within the system. In more detail: An article is an individual line-item purchase on a transaction.
  • For example: A certain hat.
A product is an article plus the other information relevant for this retail context.
  • For example: That certain hat, in the color red, available at a specific store.
The product metadata is all the other pieces of information connected to a product.
  • For example: The hat’s availability, review score, number of sellers, how many variations exist…
The SKU (stock-keeping unit) is the most detailed designator for a particular article and these are always unique. Whereas article number and group number can be shared by color variants of the same product and can therefore encompass multiple SKUs.

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Article data

An article in Customer Engagement includes standard fields and some flexible extra fields configured per client installation. These “spare fields” are of two types:
  • 10 “spare” string fields (spare1, spare2 … spare10)
  • 5 “spare” date/time fields (datespare1, datespare2 … datespare5)
These fields are used to save product data.

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Article enrichment

In receipts, articles generally lack any useful product data or metadata. This is to save space in the transmission and importing of transactions, but also to allow flexibility in adding product data later. This process is known as “enrichment”.
Enrichment involves linking the articles on a transaction with their product data.

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The SKU

An article’s SKU code is the key to enrichment. Since an SKU exists both for the article on the transaction and in the article register, this allows the two to be connected. The SKU is mapped to ArticleNr in Customer Engagement. Note that a line-item row in Customer Engagement always refers to the most detailed version of a specific article. You can read more about this here:

See introduction to transactions