Not all widgets need to be linked to purchasable products. If your site is not a traditional eCommerce site and doesn't involve a payment process or a shopping cart, you can still implement widgets in creative ways and have them linked to other sections of your site that don't fit the typical "product page" from the rest of eCommerce.
For example, you could have a widget showcasing photos for the different activities that your organization carries out, and have them linked to the section of your site that explains them. Another example would be widget that displays photos of elaborate food dishes, and have them linked to the recipe page.
Since we're dealing with non-standard implementations, it's necessary to interprete these activities, recipes... as actual products. Therefore, in order to implement these creative ideas, it's necessary to adapt them to a product feed, just like in the rest of eCommerce implementations. In this case, it's not possible to automatically generate the feed through one of our modules, so it might be necessary to create it manually.
This product feed is required to be in CSV format, and must follow these requirements:
- The delimiter must be the pipe symbol '|'
- The file must be UTF-8 encoded
- A header row must be included containing the following values:
sku|title_<langcode>|description_<langcode>|url_<langcode>|image_url|product_types
Note: <langcode> values will need to be adapted to your configuration as described below. - Since this feed is being created manually, the sku can be made up. We recommend basing it off the URL's pathname, for further cohesion.
- The <langcode> suffixes appended to "title", "description", and "url" fields can be in any existing language code format (i.e. en, en-us, en_US) and they only need to be included in the header row of the file.
These language codes are the mechanism by which our platform knows about the localized versions of the products that the widgets on your site/s will request. You can create multiple columns for the title, description, URL, and stock fields for every language that you want to include.
Note: Make sure that the language code suffixes provided in the header row match the language codes used in your eCommerce platform. - Product types should include category information for the product should you wish to use our widget category filtering options. Category names can be comma separated (e.g. "Pasta", "Vegan"). The angular bracket is used to depict hierarchy. (e.g. "Dishes > Pasta")
We recommend to host this CSV on your server, so you can assign its URL to the Catalog that you will need to create for the next step of the setup process.
Note: Since this is a non-standard implementation meant for non-eCommerce platforms, our tracking Analytics won't be able to track any purchase and therefore will be limited to views and clicks.