Index your product catalog
For your catalog to be available in your commerce store, you must index your products in the search engine. The process of indexing your catalog can be summarized as follows: uploading, transforming, processing, and storing the data in a way that the Search microservice can quickly find and retrieve recognizable and usable products' information. Basically, indexing represents the input point for successful search and discovery experiences. However, data indexing has implications at multiple levels, as by feeding your product information to the search engine, you’re also designing your commerce store's basic structure and navigation.
To help yourself design a search and discovery experience aligned with your catalog, you start by defining your commerce store' extensive data model. Then, you use it as a guideline to create a feed file, a structured inventory of your products' information. When the feed file is ready, you can start the indexing process by uploading it into the Index microservice. The Index microservice processes the feed file and transforms its information into an index, in other words, an product’s data collection stored in the search engine.
interact
If you're curious about what happens after you upload your feed, check the Catalog indexing process to discover it.
During the search and discovery experience, the Search microservice accesses the information to retrieve at query time relevant products to the query.
Before you get started with the indexing process, you need to:
Prepare the data model
Before indexing your catalog, you define which data you want to include in your search and discovery experiences and which purposes it serves. To do so, you create your commerce store data model, where you define the fields and their related attributes and specify how the search features (or any other related Empathy Platform tools) will use them as they're classified as searchable, filterable, facetable, etc.
To help you prepare your data model, check the guidelines about the fields to map in your data model.
Prepare the feed
Once you have your data model ready, you polish and organize your catalog in a feed file according to the data definition made. In the feed file, your catalog is represented as a list of documents, where each document identifies one product and describes its properties, or what is also called attributes. In the feed file, mandatory fields are the ones that identify the product (id, name, description, etc.). In contrast, optional fields add secondary information that guides the search experience (price, size, brand, stock, etc.).
To learn more about the feed file and general guidelines, see Prepare your feed file.
To check out the different types of feed files, jump into Feed file types.