Additional Information

General Information

• The ID of a product, group, or category should not exceed 9,007,199,254,740,991;
• To reduce the load on your website and speed up XML update times, we recommend:
  • supporting E or Last-Modified;
  • compressing the YML file using GZip or Zip;
• Each product can only have one image. Subsequent images are ignored;
• Any product missing a required tag or with empty content will be ignored by the system;

Caching

Without Caching

To determine if a file has changed since the last import, Retail Rocket is forced to download the file on each synchronization attempt, calculate its checksum (hash), and compare it with the hash stored from the last successful attempt. If the YML file rarely changes, downloading and calculating the checksum of the file fruitlessly loads both your servers and Retail Rocket's servers.

With Caching

Retail Rocket supports the following HTTP headers:

• ETag / If-None-Match The YML import service, during the next attempt to perform product synchronization, adds the If-None-Match header to the request to your server with the ETag value of the file that was returned by your server during the previous download. Your server must compare the ETag sent in the request with the current value. As a result of the check, the server either returns the file and an updated ETag (200 OK), or a 304 Not Modified response. Thus, if the file, according to your server, has not changed, it will not be imported into Retail Rocket.
• Last-modified / If-Modified-Since The principle of operation is similar to caching with ETag / If-None-Match, but the actual modification date of the file is used as header values.

Recommendation

We strongly recommend configuring caching for YML files.

Synchronization Frequency

Synchronization is performed continuously, with pauses between attempts ranging from 15 minutes to 2 hours. After this pause, a synchronization attempt is made. If, during the next check, the system detects that the product YML file has changed, it will be imported.

If successful synchronization does not occur within 12 hours, an email notification will be sent regarding YML loading problems. It is very important to fix these problems as soon as possible, as recommendations may become irrelevant or even disappear.

Once every 3 days, the product YML feed is synchronized, even if the file has not been changed.

YML File Requirements

• YML cannot use non-printable characters with ASCII codes from 0 to 31 (with the exception of characters with codes 9, 10, 13 - tab, line feed, carriage return).
• The size of the XML file should not exceed 33 GB;
• Characters " & > < ' must be replaced with equivalent codes:

Character in text	Code for YML file
"	"
&	&
>	>
<	<
'	'

Note

You can use the characters " & > < ' within a CDATA block in the product description.