Catalog FAQs

If your merchant’s offers aren’t showing up in your shopping experience there are a few possibilities.

First you can double check if any of the Merchant’s offers are in Violet’s system using the offers view in the Channel Dashboard and filtering by the Merchant. If you see the offers there, you can rest assured that they are correctly synced in Violet’s system.

If you do not see any offers in the previously mentioned view, there are a few reasons that might explain this:

1. Recently connected Merchants can take some time to initially sync their catalog into Violet. You can view a Merchant’s sync status here.
2. Violet monitors the state of Merchants proactively and based on certain triggers will deactivate them if they are no longer a position to accept orders. You can find out more here.

Violet monitors the state of Merchants proactively and based on certain triggers will deactivate them if they are no longer in a position to accept orders. You can find out more here.

Violet keeps it’s offer data in sync with Merchants’ e-commerce platform using a variety of mechanisms, some of which can occasionally take a handful of minutes to fully process.

If you notice an Offer’s image, description, price or any other piece of data is not in sync with what a merchant has set in their e-commerce platform, it is possible that Violet is still working on updating that information. Please check again after a few minutes.

In the case where the changes on the merchant side were not made recently, you can also use the “Resync Offer” button in the channel dashboard:

1. Go to the offers view in the dashboard.
2. Find the appropriate offer.
   Make sure you are looking at the correct offer. All offers contain an external ID that you can use to confirm a match with the product the Merchant has changed.

3. Click on the Offer to view the offer details.
   This view is a direct representation of what is stored in Violet’s system, when this view is showing the correct data, you can rest assured that Violet has the offer data stored correctly in our systems.

4. Double check that the information in this view is not in sync with the data in the Merchant’s e-commerce platform.
5. If it is not correct, scroll to the bottom and use the “Resync Offer” button to refresh the data in Violet’s systems.
6. Confirm that the data is now showing correctly.

If you have completed the above steps, including ensuring that you have the correct external product ID in relation the Merchant’s product, and the data displayed is still not correct, please contact support and provide the offerId as well as the externalId that the merchant changed.

If your merchant’s collections aren’t showing up in your shopping experience there are a couple possibilities.

1. The collections sync feature is currently not enabled by default. See here for more details.
2. The merchant platform is not supported. Check the supported platforms here.

Often times, if Violet is syncing an offer but the offer is missing some or all of the variants/skus, the issue lies in the data being retrieved from the e-commerce platform. That is, that the missing variants are not actually being sent in the data Violet retrieves from the e-commerce platform itself and thus Violet doesn’t know about it.

The root cause for this issue almost always that the merchant is using a third party variant management plugin. Plugins that allow PDP page customizations have been known to cause similar issues. If you encounter missing variants, please reach out to the merchant and ask if they are using a variant management plugin or a PDP page customization plugin in the e-commerce platform. If they are, see this question for more details.

If you have confirmed with the merchant that they are not using of the mentioned plugins and they are still having issues, please feel free to contact support.

This key determines whether a merchant has decided to have the product show up in the catalog or on their website. When set to False, the product is hidden, but it’s still technically available for purchase unless STATUS is not set to AVAILABLE. A merchant could use Visible:False and STATUS:AVAILABLE for a special link-only sales, for example. Other merchants might use Visible:False to simply hide products that they do not want to currently sell for some reason. We can’t know every merchant’s reason for setting the product’s visibility, but we set the flag accordingly so those products won’t show up if the merchant doesn’t want them to do so.

If a product is deleted by the merchant, we won’t immediately delete it, but rather mark it as ARCHIVED, instead. We do this for a couple of reasons:

1.) If the channel has that offer displayed, we wouldn’t want to have the user get a 404 when they try to access it. This way we can show the offer along with a status that lets you know that this product is gone.

2.) Some platforms allow merchants to archive products for some time, and then bring them back later. So, by archiving it, we help save them a step there.

If the offer stays archived for a long period of time, it will eventually go into a FOR_DELETION state, and that means Violet will eventually remove it.

Violet makes an effort to filter out default offers, skus and variants to keep our offer list clean of test data. This means that Violet tests the names of offers, skus and variants against known default values like “Test”, “Title”, etc.

If you are testing your integration with a test store and you are missing values, edit your data to replace default values with original values and they should begin showing up in Violet.

Violet does not support 3rd party variant management plugins. These plugins exist to provide additional variant customization beyond what e-commerce platforms provide out of the box, however as part of providing that additional support they must store all of that additional data outside of the e-commerce platform’s system.

This means that data is outside of Violet’s reach as Violet can only interact with the baseline e-commerce platform’s systems.

Violet does not support 3rd party PDP (aka Product Display Page) modifying plugins. These plugins exist to provide additional PDP customization beyond what e-commerce platforms provide out of the box, however as part of providing that additional support they must store all of that additional data outside of the e-commerce platform’s system.

This means that data is outside of Violet’s reach as Violet can only interact with the baseline e-commerce platform’s systems.

Product modifiers are selections available on a product that do not map to a specific sku. Options on the other hand are selections that lead to variants, each mapping to a specific sku. Common options include colors and sizes. Modifiers are more rare but an example might be a text field allowing a user to enter their Initials for personalization. Obviously, no one would create a sku for every possible set of initials, leading to the name modifiers since it modifies an already existing sku instead of creating a new one.

Unfortunately, Violet does not currently support modifiers, we currently only support product options. This is mainly because there is not broad support for modifiers across ecommerce platforms so adding this feature would only have piecemeal support in our supported platforms. We are open to discussing this more if this is a feature that is critical to your business.

Additionally, BigCommerce, one of the platforms that does support modifiers, currently has a bug in their API preventing us from completing a checkout with modifiers.