Content of e-Marketing Spot feeds

When you decide to offer an e-Marketing Spot as a feed, you must decide which data to display to customers in the feed reader. The data can be images or text, or both.

The web activities and default content scheduled for the e-Marketing Spot provide the data that is available for display in the feed reader. A set of feed formatting JSP files then define which pieces of the available data to include in the Atom feed that is passed to the feed reader. The data available depends on the type of web activity or default content running in the e-Marketing Spot, and your specific store implementation. Here are a few examples:

  • Consider an e-Marketing Spot that displays a "Deal of the Day" ad using a web activity with the Recommend Content action. In this example, the web activity returns the following data to the e-Marketing Spot: a single image of the "Deal of the Day" ad. When this e-Marketing Spot is offered as a feed, the data available is the single image.
  • Consider another e-Marketing Spot that displays a list of featured products using a web activity with the Recommend Catalog Entry action. In this example, the web activity returns the following data about each product to the e-Marketing Spot: product name, standard price, offer price, long description, short description, full image, thumbnail image, descriptive attributes, and so on. When this e-Marketing Spot is offered as a feed, all this data is available. If you want to display only the product name and the thumbnail image in the feed reader, a store developer can customize the associated feed JSP file to include only those two pieces of data in the Atom feed.
  • Consider another e-Marketing Spot that has no web activities running and displays default content. The same logic described in the previous examples for web activities applies to default content: the data available for the Atom feed depends on the type of default content being displayed, that is, catalog entries, categories, and content.

For e-Marketing Spot feeds displayed in a feed reader, it is important that the Atom feed contains only the specific text and images from the e-Marketing Spot that you want to display in the feed reader.

Atom feed default content

The following table lists the data that each feed entry will contain without customization of the feed formatting JSP files, based on the type of web activity that is running in the e-Marketing Spot:

Type of web activity What each entry in the Atom feed will display by default
Displays catalog entries from the store catalog using actions such as:
  • Recommend Catalog Entry
  • Display Merchandising Association
  • Display Recently Viewed
  • Display Top Browsed
  • Display Best Sellers
  • Catalog entry thumbnail image as link back to the store's product display page
  • Catalog entry name
  • Catalog entry standard price
  • Catalog entry list price and offer (standard) price.
Displays promotional advertisements and/or text using one of:
  • Recommend Content action
  • Recommend Promotion action
 One of the following:
  • Image (that is, the asset defined for the marketing content)
  • Text

If the marketing content has a predefined or custom click action, the feed will support it.
Displays categories from the store catalog using one of:
  • Recommend Category action
  • Display Recently Viewed action
  • Category thumbnail image as link back to the store's category display page
  • Category short description

Feed format

HCL Commerce delivers the feed in Atom-format XML, making it readable in browsers and on sites that support Atom feeds. If your site requires RSS-format, a store developer can customize the feed formatting JSP files. Changing the JSPs implies providing the content using different tags and a slightly different structure. The client should be able to interpret and support both formats. The feed has a parameter where you can specify what format you want. By default, HCL Commerce uses Atom format, but the format can be changed.