Manual for Icecat Live: Real-Time Product Data in Your App

Icecat Live is a (free) service that enables you to insert real-time product content from hundreds of major brands or manufacturers in any of your apps. Just with a few lines of JavaScript in your HTML template. This manual provides a quick guide on how to embed product information into your website easily. Further, we describe the Icecat Live service and give a concise overview of the Icecat inner structure. This post focuses on the embedding of Icecat Live product data, as this is the most common application of our Live interface. If you plan to integrate Icecat Live, we advise you first to integrate free Open Icecat Live and evaluate it for your purposes. And then, plan the next step by upgrading your interface to Full Icecat.

Please, note that Open Icecat Live requires a free subscription. Therefore, first register (free) if you don’t have an account yet to receive an Icecat username and access to the Icecat Control Panel.

Other Integration Methods

If you want to integrate product data without frames, conforming to your CSS, then use this Icecat Live manual. Live (JS) is the modern variant of the good-old URL integration method.

If you want to download data to your own cloud environment and have full control over the data, then make use of the XML, JSON, or CSV download methods. Further, check out the Add-On page for popular platforms already integrating Icecat data. Are you interested in adding product reviews? Then check out our reviews manual. Brand owners that look into pushing data into Icecat, please, look into our Push-API or for manual data-entry Icecat’s Free Vendor Central.

What is Icecat Live?

What is Icecat Live? Icecat Live is basically a JavaScript (JS) service, providing real-time inserts of product data in client websites. Icecat Live both enables the seamless insert of a full product data sheet, and the seamless insert of individual content assets, without the need to use frames or iframes like in the Icecat URL service. The Live version is the easy integration where -in the case of Full Icecat- all authorization and security is handled at the Icecat server side.

The supported content assets are:

• Product Identifiers
• Product Title
• Category
• Marketing Text
• Specs incl. explanatory texts
• Images
• Reasons To Buy (Feature logos and/or feature texts)
• Videos (links to third-party resources are not displayed)
• Leaflets & Manuals (PDF)
• 3D Tours/360o objects
• Expert Reviews

The JavaScript (JS) calls makes it very easy for channel partners to embed product information into their websites with just a few lines of code in an HTML template or app. Both a complete data sheet and individual objects can be called. In this manual, we included the calls for the most popular individual objects.

Please, note that some Open Icecat brands like Philips, make certain rich media assets (e.g., video) only available for their Authorized Resellers. Please, contact us in case you see on the icecat website more assets than that you can access through Icecat Live.

Choosing the right Icecat license: Start with free Open Icecat

Open Icecat is a worldwide unique, open catalog, with product data sheets in cooperation with major global brands and channel partners. The Open Icecat data-sheets are fully approved by the sponsoring manufacturers and are distributed for free to channel partners to reduce their content costs and improve the shopping experience. Open Icecat contains the product specifications and additional information in one single standardized format, which facilitates easy categorizing, filtering, searching, and comparison of products.

In return, we require the Users of free Open Icecat to inform their business partners (distributors, manufacturers, retailers) via a newsletter and/or on the website that they are using Open Icecat, and that they require their partners to join as well so that all product content will become available through the free, open catalog. The more brands join, the better and more complete Open Icecat will become.

TIP: Choose Open Icecat if you are new to Icecat or Icecat Live.

If you want to decide to use Icecat, it may be important first to analyze the coverage of your portfolio or the portfolio of your supplier. You can always ask us to provide you with an overview of the current coverage of (stock) portfolio of your suppliers (f.e., distributors) at any given moment. We strive to cover at least 90% of the stock portfolio (stock > 1) of mainstream distributors and work together with partners to daily monitor this coverage. Read more about Why Upgrade to Full Icecat.

If you want to analyze coverage yourself, you need to register and upload your catalog to Icecat via the Icecat Control Panel. In the match analysis, you get the match percentages for Full Icecat and Open Icecat, and you can get a list of the unrecognized products. An advantage is that you can also, optionally, display your offers on the Icecat price comparison sites.

TIP: if you upload your price feed, Icecat will automatically provide you with your private Icecat index if you want to use the Data interfaces of Icecat. For more information, see also the Icecat Subscription Plans. If you want to upgrade to Full Icecat Live, you can contact us via the contact form or the Icecat Control Panel.

Access to Icecat

To obtain access to Open Icecat, you will need Icecat login credentials. If you don’t have these yet, please, register online for free to Open Icecat.

TIP: for many mainstream solutions standard interfaces are available, including Magento, Prestashop, osCommerce (and siblings) and Batavi.

Embedding Icecat Live JS into your website

Below you may find the data flow diagram of Icecat Live JS integration:

Icecat Live JS API

Icecat Live refers to a program code written in JavaScript (JS) that is embedded in a web page and executed by the browser of your site visitor when a page is downloaded by the respective visitor, or in response to an event triggered by you as a Partner.

JS allows creating a bridge between a webshop and the Icecat catalog, which makes it possible to incorporate product information (descriptions, leaflets, multimedia objects) into merchant webshops. Moreover, Icecat Live uses Document Object Model (DOM), which allows updating content dynamically.

TIP: to see Icecat Live in action, JavaScript should be enabled in your browser.

Open Icecat Live integration

On every product page of an Open Icecat brand, a demo can be found of an Icecat Live integration. Go for example to the HP Spectre Pro x360 product page, and click in the “Embed the product data-sheet in your content” section on the link “Icecat LIVE: JS for HP V1B02EA”. A new page will then open that demonstrates the use of Icecat Live JS.

As a demo, we also made a very simple integration example of an Icecat Live data sheet on a blog page, using an Icecat demo account and test account on Blogger.com. It also gives an HTML code example of a very simple webpage with the Icecat Live JS code embedded:

<html>
<head>
<script src="https://live.icecat.biz/js/live-current-2.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="IcecatLive">
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
setTimeout(function(){IcecatLive.getDatasheet('#IcecatLive',{'UserName': 'openIcecat-live','Brand':'HP','ProductCode':'F0Y97EA'},'en');}, 200);
</script>
</body>
</html>

TIP:  ‘openIcecat-live’ is just the name of a demo account, that will give a “demo” message as well in the header. Use your own free Icecat user account, and this demo message will disappear.

Follow these three simples steps to integrate Open Icecat Live on your website:

1) To embed the Icecat Live library into an HTML page:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="//live.icecat.biz/js/live-current-2.js"></script>

NOTE: it's not necessary to put the any part of the script in the <head> part of the HTML as was done in the example above.

2) To insert into an HTML page a specific DOM element by a unique Id:

<div id="IcecatLive"></div>

3) To make the Live Icecat library call with your personal parameters:

<script type="text/javascript">
setTimeout(function()
{
IcecatLive.getDatasheet('#IcecatLive', {
'UserName': 'userShopName',
'GTIN': '1234567891234',
'Brand': 'abcdefg',
'ProductCode': '123abcdefg',
'IcecatProductId':'123456',
}, 'en');
}, 200);

There are three ways to access a data-sheet: by ‘Brand’+’ProductCode’, by ‘GTIN‘ or by ‘IcecatProductId’.

a. Do a call by Brand + Manufacturer Product Code combination. We will try to recognize the product even for a known variation of Manufacturer Product Code.

Example:

IcecatLive.getDatasheet('#IcecatLive',{'UserName': 'demoshop',
'Brand':'Philips','ProductCode':'123456789'},'en', 200);

b. Do a call by GTIN code (EAN or UPC or JAN)
Example:

IcecatLive.getDatasheet('#IcecatLive',{'UserName': 'demoshop',‘GTIN’:'8478097595798729'},'en', 200);

Description of the parameters:

Value	Explanation
UserName	Icecat User Name
Brand	The brand name of the product
ProductCode	The brand’s product code or manufacturer part number, uniquely identifying the product in combination with the brand name. Also called manufacturer part code.
GTIN	The GTIN: EAN (European Article Number ), UPC (Universal Product Code) or JAN (Japan Article Number)
IcecatProductId	Icecat’s Internal numerical product identifier. Only to be used by advanced users that (already) make use of the Icecat index files.
‘en’	An example (en=English – GB) of the two or five-character code used by Icecat to identify the locale. There are more than 40 languages or locales available in Icecat. See here the complete language/locale code table of Icecat.
200	An example (200s) of a time-out setting in seconds

LIVE API multilingual calls

The Icecat Live API supports multilingual calls to retrieve digital assets related to multiple locales.

In case a user wants to retrieve a specific container or the whole Icecat Live block for a product in one preferred language, but it’s not available, a user can apply a backup language. To implement this logic a user just needs to pass the list of language codes as an array. For example, [‘en’, ‘fr’] where UK English (en) is the preferred language and France French (fr) is the backup language. In this case, fr content will be retrieved if the en content is not available.

It is possible to add up to 5 languages to the array. Please, find more info and an example script in this article.

Look & Feel customization

Open Icecat Live is responsive by design and adapts to your own CSS. If more customization is needed, you can customize our JS to your own needs. To perform customization, you need to store icecatlive.js locally on your server, edit it to your own needs and switch to your customized library in your HTML code.

Please, note that Icecat does not support client customized JS libraries. If you use these, arrange support yourself.

Call Individual Objects: Video, 3D and Reasons-To-Buy

In case that you don’t want to insert the complete data-sheet (IcecatLive.getDatasheet), but only a specific object, we have created separate calls for inserting a Video, a 3D tour or Reasons To Buy.

NOTE: these are the most common requests for individual objects. Contact us for information about other calls for individual objects or CSS customization.

The syntax is as follows:

1. IcecatLive.getVideos (outputSelector, resource_id, lang)
2. IcecatLive.get3DTours (outputSelector, resource_id, lang)
3. IcecatLive.getRTB (outputSelector, resource_id, lang)

getVideos, get3DTours, and getRTB are separate calls of video, 3D tours (360o views), and Reasons To Buy respectively. The parameters which you have to pass to these methods are completely the same as with the already discussed getDatasheet call. outputSelector is a container where you want to place Icecat Live’s content; resource_id is a query parameter and lang is the preferred language (or locale) for the page.

Examples of a call for the video(s) object.

With Brand + Part Code (see also a test on a blog):

 IcecatLive.getVideos("#videosContainer", {
 'UserName': 'openicecat-live',
 'Brand':'Philips',
 'ProductCode':'50PFL5008T/12',
 }, 'en');

With GTIN (EAN, UPC):

 IcecatLive.getVideos("#videosContainer", {
 'UserName': 'openicecat-live',
 'GTIN': '8712581669904',
 }, 'en');

Example of a call for a 3D tour object (syntax variants are the same as for getVideos):

 IcecatLive.get3DTours("#toursContainer", {
 'UserName': 'openicecat-live',
 'GTIN': '8712581669904',
 }, 'en');

Example of a call for an RTB object (syntax variants are the same as for getVideos):

 IcecatLive.getRTB("#RTBContainer", {
 'UserName': 'openicecat-live',
 'GTIN': '8712581669904',
 }, 'en');

The parameters are equal to the ones for getting a complete data sheet.

Integrating videos via Play Button

Icecat Live allows users to integrate videos into their product pages by creating a custom video play button that opens videos in a modal window. More information and examples of implementation can be found in this article.

Further Questions or Remarks?

Please, contact us in case of questions or comments via your Icecat account manager or via the website