Checklist for Active Merchandising

To implement active data for a B2C Commerce site, tag the site for data collection and import other attribute values.

This page lists the tasks in the order. Because analytics-driven merchandising involves the collection, import, analysis, and calculation of values for merchandising, you must complete all analytics-driven merchandising tasks before implementing personalization or searchandising.

Preparation and Planning

Task	Role	~Time
Present active merchandising slide set to the customer, emphasizing how it works for them, and the steps to get there. Review this checklist.	Salesforce B2C Commerce: CRM/Merchandising Customer: Developer and Merchant	2 hours
Assign roles for merchandising tasks to make sure that personnel have the appropriate permissions in Business Manager.	Customer: Administrator, Developer, and Merchant	1 hour
Contact Salesforce Support to request active merchandising enablement. Provide the following information in your request email: Customer realm ID Site name Site location: EU or US Projected page views per day for the site Site currency Base URL Site time zone Expected site go-live date	Customer: Developer	15 minutes to make the request 3 hours to 1 week for Salesforce to enable the feature
Read the active merchandising documentation thoroughly. Reading the documentation can speed the implementation and validation process.	Customer: Developer	2 hours

Data Collection Set Up and Configuration

Task	Role	~Time
Develop a searchandising and personalization strategy for your site. Determine any custom attributes you want to create and use for sorting search results or creating customer group promotions.	Customer: Merchant	1–3 hours
Assign roles for merchandising tasks.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Make sure that personnel have the appropriate permissions.	Customer: Administrator	15 minutes
Add new tags to your Internet Store Markup Language (ISML) templates to collect data from your site. Use the SiteGenesis implementation of active merchandising as an example of tagging. Refer to the Reference Application implementation of active merchandising for information on what templates to tag for sites based on the older reference application.	Customer: Developer	30 minutes to 4 hours
Validate the Tagging Effort.	Customer: Developer	5 minutes
Review page tagging for accuracy using the Analytics Debugger.	B2C Commerce: CRM Customer: Developer	2-hour meeting
Customer includes a file for the Cost and Newness metrics. Creating Feeds. Creating the Custom .csv Feed Files. Importing the Custom .Csv Feed Files and rebuild the product search index. You can then immediately test rules based on imported feed data, as long as you also have active data available. Warning: Active Data imports use REPLACE mode. Attributes not in the CSV file are permanently deleted. See the import topic for prerequisites and data loss warnings.	Customer: Developer and Administrator	Varies based on requirements (for the tasks, 15, 30, and 5 minutes, respectively)
Automate the feed import. Create an import pipeline for active data feeds using the ImportActiveData pipelet. Create a job to automate active data import.	Customer: Developer	30 minutes
(Optional) If your searchandising or personalization strategy requires it, create custom attributes for the ProductActiveData and CustomerActiveData objects.	Customer: Developer	Depends on the number of attributes to be created, but if the number is under five, approximately 20 minutes.
Make tagging changes as required.	Customer: Developer	1 day
Update the Salesforce Support ticket to indicate that the active data collection is ready to go live.	Customer: Developer
Make tagging changes as required.	Customer: Developer	1 day
Update the Salesforce Support ticket to indicate that the active data collection is ready to go live.	Customer: Developer

Searchandizing

Task	Role	~Time
Provide searchandising strategy session and sorting rules training.	B2C Commerce: CRM Customer: Merchant	1 day
Create Dynamic Attributes.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Create Sorting Rules.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Create Storefront Sorting Options.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Configure a Category Default Sorting Rule.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Set the Keyword Search Sorting Rule.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
(Migration from Previous Version Only) When implementing active merchandising in an existing site, you must also change all calls to the Search pipeline to use the new sorting rule ID parameter instead of sortBy parameters.	Customer: Developer	15 minutes
(New implementation only) Make sure any calls to the Search pipeline use the sorting rule ID parameter. See the Product and Search pipelines in the latest SiteGenesis Storefront Core cartridge.	Customer: Developer	15 minutes
When you've tuned your sorting rules to your satisfaction, stage them from your Staging instance to your Production instance.	Customer: Administrator	15 minutes
After a minimum of 1 day, review the top selling product pages in Business Manager to test the data collection.	B2C Commerce: CRM Customer: Merchant	15 minutes for the test results, 1-hour meeting to discuss results.

Personalization

Task	Role	~Time
Provide a personalized merchandising strategy session and readiness check. Check existing customer groups and content slots.	B2C Commerce: CRM/Merchandising Customer: Developer	Varies
Provide personalized merchandising training that includes best practices for creating dynamic customer groups and slot configurations.	B2C Commerce: CRM/Merchandising Customer: Merchant	1/2 day
Create or edit customer group definitions.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Create or edit content slots for personalized merchandising.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes
Define customer groups as part of slot configuration rules.	Customer: Merchant	15 minutes

Troubleshooting

Task	Role	~Time
Regularly monitor your daily active data feed and consult customer support if you experience any problems.	Customer: Administrator	5 minutes
Configure Active Data	Customer: Developer or Merchant	as desired