Introduction
Engage holds an internal article register for each tenant, containing all the articles (purchasable items) in the client's system. This register is created and updated in two ways: using a product feed, or by an article XML import.
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.
An article is an individual line-item purchase on a transaction.
Example: A certain hat.
A product is an article plus the other information relevant for this retail context.
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.
Example: The hat's availability, review score, how many sellers there are, how many variations exist...
Article data
An article in Engage 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.
Product data
There are two ways to leverage product data in Engage:
Using already purchased articles to segment and analyze a contact's buying behavior
Inserting product information when populating emails (read more about this here).