Icecat Release Notes: nRT XML, Taxonomy Report final

Hereby the highlights of the Icecat release notes of September 17, 2020. The near real-time (nRT) XML interface is now live for the first users. Further, the taxonomy report per category is now final. Another major highlight is that a brand’s ranking is now split out per country in the brand rank page. Further, we mention a few minor updates.

Near Real-Time XML Live

We are happy that our near real-time XML (nRT) interface is now live for the first client. The respective client response is positive as its users are “very happy that the new XML syndication is so much faster than the old one”. After further successful tests, we will turn it on for all clients so that everybody gets the new nRT XML.

What changed? In our current XML API, we generate all the .xml files in batch and save them on our server. That’s a lot of data storage. Further, any change in our taxonomy or in any product data-sheet is queued for a while before it is published, in the old situation. Instead, our nRT XML interface generates product XML when a client sends a data-sheet request. All XMLs are thus generated on the fly and not in batch. That’s why changes are much faster available in our nRT XML interfaces. However, in some cases, it might still take up to 20-30 minutes. For example, in case of generic taxonomy updates.

Taxonomy report per category final

On every product page on icecat we publish a taxonomy-per-category report. This to make it easy to understand category-specific data models as supported by Icecat. Based on user feedback, we dropped the following columns from this excel report: “Values place” and “Class”. As mentioned before, they have only an internal Icecat function. Additionally, the report now contains the new column “Restricted value”.

Another small update is that we put the category name between quotes so that the text line is not broken when only the category name is given in a local language:

Added Rank per country to Brand Rank Page

Now, we show a rank per country in the country graph on the brand rank page. For more information see: https://iceclog.com/a-brand-rank-per-country-visualized-based-on-online-downloads-by-the-ecommerce-channel/

Added preprocessing stage to brand feed Signify

In our import PIM system, we have a lot of different brand feeds running. Usually, we process brand feeds step by step. But, for Signify, we implemented the possibility to first aggregate data, and only after preprocessing, in which we apply all business logic, we send the data into our PIM system. It optimizes the speed for the existing Signify data import. We have now the possibility to do the same for other brand import feeds when required.

Dropped from HP product relations feed: the tag “Recommended by brand”.

Removed “Any editor” drop-down for brand users in Icecat Vendor Central

Increased Product Story size limitation

For the digital asset Product Story, a brand’s mini-site, we increased the storage limitation from 50Mb to 150Mb per product story. Necessary, as it can contain quite some multimedia files.

Datasheet downloads report per user locale

In our reporting system, a user can create a report with all locales that are relevant for shops. In the excel output, we added the new column “Locales”.