Manual: Product Story Content Requirements and Blocks

Product Stories create an enhanced online shopping experience for online visitors, due to the fact that they follow a brand’s look and feel and present its content in a brand-consistent way across its whole channel. Thus, each product story has a branded layout of multimedia and messaging assets to provide a recognizable and immersive online shopping experience. Further, they are easy to integrate by a brand’s channel partners.

The content in a product story is divided into different predefined blocks. Therefore, the combination of these content blocks forms the brand’s unique Product Story format. If you are elaborating a product story format, what are the Product Story format requirements? And, which blocks are available?

Below, you can download the complete Product Story manual:

Which content blocks are available?

Company logo / Cover block

1. Thin logo
2. Thick logo

Image & text block

1. Text left & Image right
2. Image left & text right
3. Image top & text bottom
4. Three benefits images
5. Two benefit images

Image and text overlay block

1. Overlay image, text right
2. Overlay image, text left

Block with text and video or video carousel

1. Video
2. A video carousel (up to 5)
3. Text top, video bottom
4. Text left, video right
5. The Text right, video left
6. The text bottom, video top

Image carousel block

1. Carousel with thumbnails
2. Regular carousel
3. Carousel left, text right
4. Carousel right, text left
5. A carousel with images and text
6. Carousel top, text bottom

Hotspot image block

1. Image with hotspots
2. Image with hotspots top, text bottom
3. Carousel with hotspot images
4. A carousel with hotspot images top, text bottom
5. Carousel with hotspot images left, text right

Image content requirements?

For images, the Icecat PIM supports the following file types: JPG, and PNG. The image size should not exceed 2 MB and the resolution should be at least 72 dpi with RGB colorspace. The Icecat PIM resizes high-resolution images. However, smaller images are not adjusted.

We recommend for bricks with 1-2 images, a minimum resolution of 500x500pixels, and for bricks with 3-4 images, a minimum resolution of 250×250 pixels. For the company logo, image overlay bricks, the minimum resolution is 1100×400.

Product stories are responsive to each device, as the system automatically resizes images and fits texts. So, there is no need to provide multimedia content for mobile devices separately. Additionally, it is not allowed to use images with watermarks. Try to avoid reusing the same image from the Icecat product image gallery. Also, make sure that annotations on images have enough quality so that the text can be understood on mobile devices.

Content requirements for video

The Icecat PIM supports the following video file types: MPEG4, and AVI. The Video size should not exceed 50 MB. The PIM supports Youtube links but this is not preferred. The reason for this is that at some point the link may become obsolete. Furthermore, it is allowed to use Youtube links only from the official brand’s channels.

Content requirements Messaging elements

There are multiple things to consider regarding the messaging elements. First of all, it is not allowed to mix different languages in one product story. Secondly, bold, italic formatting is intended to be used to highlight headings or a few select words, not the entire paragraphs. Finally, strings of all-caps text are prohibited.

Regarding HTML tags, these are all prohibited, except those for:

• Bold
• Italic style
• End of line

Please, try not to inject walls of text into product story modules. The recommended limits are applicable to the following blocks:

• Without images, the maximum amount of characters is 1000.
• Including 1-2 images, the maximum amount of characters is 500
• Including 2-4 images, the maximum amount of characters is 250
• With overlay text, the maximum amount of characters is 250
• Hot spot texts: 70 characters per spot

Product story workflow

Stage 1

Every brand is free to define its own combination of bricks to design unique and outstanding Product Stories. In case that a desired brick is not yet available in our Icecat Studio library, our HTML developers are ready to add a new brick design. On the other hand, Icecat Studio designers can analyze the input from brands and product descriptions on official sources and design examples, and suggest the best combination of existing bricks. The Icecat Studio teams design the blueprints per category/family for the brand to approve.

Stage 2

The brand provides content assets, and marketing materials. The editorial team produces the Product Stories according to agreed blueprints and requirements. Brands may have access to Icecat Studio. And, thus, brands can approve, create, adjust, remove product stories themselves.

Stage 3

The brand provides a matching file with GTINs & Product Codes to Product Stories. The editorial team publishes the Product Stories attached to the respective data sheets in the Icecat catalog.