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Engage holds an internal article register for each tenant, containing all the articles (purchasable items) in the client’s system. This register is created and updated in two ways: using a product feed, or by an article XML import. The line-items on a contact’s transaction represent articles. By connecting these to the product data for those articles, you can more precisely segment and analyze a contact’s shopping behavior. The more data you have about a product, the more you know about the person who bought it.
  • An article is an individual line-item purchase on a transaction. Example: A certain hat.
  • A product is an article plus the other information relevant for this retail context. Example: That certain hat, in the color red, available at a specific store.
  • The product metadata is all the other pieces of information connected to a product. Example: The hat’s availability, review score, number of sellers, how many variations exist…
The SKU (stock-keeping unit) is the most detailed designator for a particular article and these are always unique. Whereas article number and group number can be shared by color variants of the same product and can therefore encompass multiple SKUs.

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Article data

An article in Engage includes standard fields and some flexible extra fields configured per client installation. These “spare fields” are of two types:
  • 10 “spare” string fields (spare1, spare2 … spare10)
  • 5 “spare” date/time fields (datespare1, datespare2 … datespare5)
These fields are used to save product data.

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Article enrichment

The articles in transactions don’t contain any of the useful product data or metadata. This is to save space in the transmission and importing of transactions, but also to allow flexibility in adding product data later, a process known as “enrichment”.
Enrichment is linking the articles on a transaction with their product data.
An article’s SKU code is the key to enrichment. Since an SKU exists both for the article on the transaction and in the article register, this allows the two to be connected. The SKU is mapped to ArticleNr in Engage. Note that a line-item row in Engage always refers to the most detailed version of a specific article. You can read more about this in the introduction to transactions.