API

Additional information

General information

  • Id of a product, group or a category should not exceed the number 9 007 199 254 740 991.
  • In order to reduce the loads on your website and speed up the XML update time, we recommend you the following:
    • using ETag;
    • archive a XML file with GZip.
  • A product should have only one picture. If there are more than one parameters, they would be ignored.
  • Any product that missing required parameter or its content is empty is ignored by the system.

Caching

Without caching

In order to understand whether the file has changed since the last import, Retail Rocket has to download the file at each synchronization attempt, calculate its checksum (hash) and compare it with the hash stored from the last successful attempt. If the product XML-feed changes rarely, the import every two hours loads both your and the Retail Rocket servers without useful result.

With caching

Retail Rocket supports the following HTTP headers:

  • ETag / If-None-Match
    The XML-downloader adds an If-None-Match header with the ETag value of the file that was returned by your server during the previous sync in the request to your server. Your server should compare the ETag from the request with the current value. As a result of the check, the server either returns the file and the updated ETag (200 OK), or the response 304 Not Modified.
    Thus, if the file has not changed according to your server, it will not be imported into Retail Rocket.
  • Last-modified / If-Modified-Since
    Work principle is similar to caching using ETag / If-None-Match, only the date of the actual file change is used as the header values.

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Recommendation

We highly recommend setting up caching of XML-files.

Synchronization frequency

Synchronization is performed continuously, with pauses between attempts from 15 minutes to 2 hours. After this pause, synchronization is attempted. If during the next check the system detects that the product XML file has changed, it is importing to the system.

If within 12 hours there is no successful synchronization, we sent email which is notifying you of problems with loading XML. It's important to fix problems as quickly as possible, because recommendations can become outdated or even disappear.

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