Icecat Release Notes May 7, 2020: Added Malayalam and Support for Product Stories

Most updates in this sprint are related to improving the Icecat Vendor Central (Editor PIM) and functionalities related to Product Stories, i.e., brand-specific mini-sites. Further, the Indian language Malayalam is added, catalog coverage performance is improved, and some issues related to the Pull-APIs and Icecat front office are resolved.

Support for the Indian language Malayalam added

After a request by one of our global e-com clients, we added support of Malayalam, in addition to Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Malayalam is one of the 22 official languages in India, spoken by almost 3% of the Indian population, in total 37 million people worldwide. Malayalam is an official language in the Indian state of Kerala, and is also widely spoken in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by Malayali people.

It is added to the Icecat system as Malayalam, with code “ML” for the country India.

Vendor Central (Icecat PIM)

A few minor updates of the Editorial workflow:

– Automated “unbooking” of product after five days, if the assigned editor didn’t add any data to the booked product.
– Product blocking comments from editors will be automatically removed after three months. Comment example: “The category does not exist, No image available.”
– The possibility to approve a product mapping when a product is described by an editor. This mapping approval can only be done by the users with authorization clearance superuser and supereditor.

Improved advanced search for editors

Now the possibility is added to select products that are enriched with a so-called Product Story, i.e., a multimedia object (MMO) in the form of an html5 mini-site. Brands like HP, DELL and Huawei are increasingly investing in their Product Stories.

Family brand name configurator

The Icecat taxonomy team can now configure to have a brand named automatically added to the family name. For example adding “HP” to its family names OMEN X and OMEN. The result then will be OMEN X by HP and OMEN by HP, respectively. Such family names can be used for products belonging to selected categories.

Reporting API: Improved Coverage Report Performance

Account managers regularly run catalog coverage reports for clients. The new Reporting API is now applied to coverage report generation as well.
The new API has an 18 to 300 times better performance:

• 1 line in the coverage file: now 2-3 seconds vs 10-15 minutes before
• 100,000 lines in the coverage file: now 15-20 minutes vs 5-6 hours before

Pull-API: Language backup Product Story

We activated back-up language logic for the multimedia object “Product Story” in Icecat Live and JSON. It means that – for example – if there is no Mexico-Spanish Product Story, the Spain-Spanish one will be used.

After implementing new logic with Release Data for HP products, a partial roll back is done for the INT(ernational) locale as there was a client escalation.

Resolved Frontoffice issues

• A 500 “internal server” error was reported when trying to send a message from the contact page from China
• My profile and Registration pages: too long values in the Business Platform field disturbed the layout.
• Removed extra spaces in the image tags on the Product Page