Two new features have been rolled out on Avail SaaS: the ability to update availability of products real-time and merchandising.
Updating the Availability
In Avail nomenclature a product available for being recommended is called valid. With the new API method setProductValidity it is possible to change the validity of a product real-time. You can change a product to being not-valid, which will cause it to not be recommended any more if you have set Only Valid to true in your template. Also, it is possible to make a non-valid product valid and thus making it eligible for being recommended. This method will only be available through the JSON-RPC interface.
Merchandising
It is now possible to do manual merchandising with Avail SaaS. Templates that previously have been used to filter the recommendation can now also be used to choose what products to display. Instead of a template filtering a set of recommendations, the template filters the whole product set. This gives you an very easy and flexible way to set which product to display on for example the start page, a landing page or a category page. Examples of what you can choose to display:
- the five latest DVD releases
- the most popular product that are on sale
- explicitly set products, for example staff recommendation
- top-sellers in a given category
- and much more...
Which criteria that can be set up depends on the data uploaded to Avail SaaS. For example, to sort or filter on price, product prices data have to be uploaded.
In the Control Panel you will be able to use two new settings that work for merchandising only:
- Column to Sort On - sets which product data column the result should be sorted on. Examples: price, release date, sales numbers.
- Sort Order - sets if the sorting should be ascending (lowest first) or descending (highest first).
The new API method for invoking merchandising is called getProducts. The method supports dynamic parameters and returning product meta data just as the recommendations-methods.
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