StatusSupport
Tweakwise.comTweakwise AppContact
Back to All

Feature | The concept of Item types for non-products

June 11th, 2024

In order to show inspirational content, sponsored blocks, banners and/or visuals on your listings, Tweakwise now has the possibility to import non-product items to your catalog and interact with these items as you are used to do like it being products. With this major update we prepare ourselves for the future, where inspiration and engagement (time on site) will become even a bigger part of e-commerce. Previously Tweakwise could only handle product-information, from now on we support non-product items as well.

Item types and Frontend API

Out of the box we treat all items as products. On instance-level we now can configure any feed-attribute as discriminator to distinguish types of data. We call this the item-type characteristic. When setup correctly (by Tweakwise), this item-type will then act as a non-product in Tweakwise App and will be exposed by our Frontend API. You'll notice there will be a type field for every item returned by the Frontend API.

<item>
  <type>product</type>
  <itemno>10001-101</itemno>
  <title>Tweakwise Hoodie Blue</title>
  ...
</item>

{
    "type": "product",
    "itemno": "10001-101",
    "title": "Tweakwise Hoodie Blue",
    // ...
}

Items module

As your catalog might not only contain products from now on but also contain non-products, we renamed products to items and introduce a new items module. You can activate this fresh looking module by enabling the toggle in your personal in App settings (by clicking on your avatar in the top right corner in Tweakwise App). The new items module will output all available items in your catalog and shows the item-type as a label.

Builder component

Each unique value for the item-type attribute which is configured as characteristic, will pop up as item in your builder. It makes it easy to allocate a certain spot on your lister, and assign the correct record for allocated spot. After a publish, the information will become available in the Frontend API and can be implemented in the frontend of your platform.

Separated feed import possibilities

As we have created some extra complexity in the catalog by introducing item-types, there is a major upgrade on how to configure your import-feeds. Previously we only accepted one big feed containing both product as category information, but from now on it is possible to separate your feeds.

In Tweakwise App > Connectivity > Tasks you should have configured at least one import task and one publish task. For every import task, there is a new setting available which says something on what information you want to import:

  1. Import all: Items (products and non-products) and categories will be imported and should be available in one single feed. There will be a second option to choose whether you which item-types you want to import: a) all item b) types (default), c) products, visuals.
  2. Import items only Items (products and non-products) will be imported. Categories will be ignored in case they exist in this specific feed. There will be a second option to choose whether you which item-types you want to import: a) all item b) types (default), c) products, visuals.
  3. Import categories only Categories will be imported. Items (products an non-products) will be ignored. There is no extra setting to configure.

📘

This feature requires custom development at the frontend of your platform. This still has to be implemented in our Magento plugins as well. However, if you run Tweakwise via a JS implementation, this feature is instantly available and covered.

To learn more, go to the following topics: