Offline Purchases Onboarding

Onboarding offline purchase data (such as physical store purchases) to Dynamic Yield enables you to serve personalized experiences to your visitors (or email subscribers) based on their offline activity. You can onboard purchases with a user identifier, or they can be anonymous (just the transaction information). 

Onboarding offline purchase data enables you to:

• Use recommendation algorithms that consider offline behavior, including:
  • Popularity: Recommends the most popular products based on both offline and online purchases.
  • Purchased Together Offline: Recommends items that were purchased offline, regardless of whether they are now being purchased online.
  • Purchased Together Offline & Online: Recommends items that were purchased together offline or online.
  • Affinity: Recommends products based on previous user behavior (for offline purchases that include identifiers).
  • Recently purchased: Recommends products based on the visitor's recent purchases.
  • Last Purchased: Recommends products based on the visitor's last purchase.
• Create audiences or target users based on their offline purchases, using the condition Product purchased offline.
• Enrich user affinity profiles based on both their online activity and offline purchases.
• Personalize emails based on both the user's online and offline activities (also supported for users without online activity). Requires an Opted-in Email Addresses feed. 
• Export audiences based on their offline purchases (also supported for users without online activity). Requires Opted-in Email Addresses feed. 

Upload the offline feed at least once a week so that product recommendations are based on recent transaction data.

Uploading identified offline transactions

You can synchronize a feed containing offline transactions from identified users: Create a CSV file containing the transactions, and synchronize it as a Dynamic Yield data feed of type Identified Offline Purchases. 

To match identified offline purchases with online users, a common unique identifier is required. This is accomplished by sending Omni-Channel events such as Login, Signup, and Identify User, and then including the same identifier when you upload the offline transactions, as described: 

Prepare the File

Create a CSV file that contains the columns described in the following table, using commas as separators. No specific naming convention is required:

• File type: CSV
• Maximum number of rows: 1.5M
• Each line should include one SKU of an offline purchase:
  • If a purchase includes 3 SKUs, use 3 rows (1 SKU per row).
  • If a purchase includes 1 SKU that was purchased 3 times, use a single row and use the "quantity" attribute.

The file should not include duplicate rows and should be sorted by transactionId. Each row represents a purchased SKU. A single transaction including 2 identical shirts for $20 dollars each (discounted from $25 list price), and one jacket for $100, there would be two lines in your CSV with the following values: 

Upload the File

1. In the Experience OS console, go to Assets › Data Feeds.
2. Click Add New and select Identified Offline Purchases.
3. Select CSV as the sync method.
4. Write down the displayed S3 credentials.
5. Save and Activate the Data Feed.
6. At any time, upload a new feed file to a folder in your S3 bucket, as follows: <s3 bucket URL>/YYYY-MM-DD/
   The feed file can have any name, but cannot include the "-" (dash) character. 
   A new folder must be created for every day that you synchronize the file. Whenever a new file is uploaded, Dynamic Yield ingests it immediately.
7. You can check the synchronization status and check for errors by looking at the Data Feed list and downloading the log. For more details, see File Error Handling below. 

Uploading anonymous offline transactions

To sync offline purchases without any user identifiers, do the following: 

Prepare the File

• File type: CSV
• Filename: anonymousofflinepurchases.csv (recommended. Special characters might not be supported)
• Maximum number of rows: 1.5M
• Each line should include one SKU of an offline purchase:
  • If a purchase includes 3 SKUs - use 3 rows (1 SKU per row).
  • If a purchase includes 1 SKU that was purchased 3 times - use a single row and use the "quantity" attribute.

Format:

The file should not include duplicate rows and should be sorted by transactionId. Each row represents a purchased SKU. A single transaction including 2 identical shirts for $20 dollars each (discounted from $25 list price), and one jacket for $100, there would be two lines in your CSV with the following values: 

Upload the File

1. In Dynamic Yield, go to Assets › Data Feeds.
2. Click Add New and select Anonymous Offline Purchases.
3. Select CSV as the sync method.
4. Write down the S3 credentials that are displayed.
5. Save and Activate the Data Feed.
6. Upload a new feed file any time to a folder in your S3 bucket as follows: <s3 bucket URL>/YYYY-MM-DD/
   The feed file can have any name, but cannot use the "-" (dash) character. 
   A new folder must be created for every day that you sync the file. Whenever a new file is uploaded, Dynamic Yield will ingest it immediately.
7. You can check the synchronization status and check for errors by looking at the Data Feed list and downloading the log. For more details, see File Error Handling below. 

File error handling

Several validations are performed when a file is synchronized, and an error file is created with all the rows with errors, and an additional column with the relevant error message. You can download the error log directly in the Data Feeds list. For more details, see Validating Your Web Implementation. The validations check that the following are true:

• File isn’t empty.
• Mandatory columns (for example, transactionId, productId) are not missing from the file.
• No negative values for certain fields (value, transactionItemValue, Item Price, quantity).
• The TRANSACTION_DATE is a valid date.

The error file is uploaded to the same folder as the file you are synchronizing. It is named <Feed name>-Feed-Log-MM-DD-YYYY-HH-MM-SS. 

If more than 20% of the rows contain errors, the file is not synchronized and will be marked with the error: “synced with error”. Files with fewer than 20% errors are synced with the status “synced with warnings”.

Duplicate transactionId

If 2 files are imported and contain the same transactionId within 24 hours, the related purchases of the 2nd file are ignored. After that, the purchase events are stored. 

Validating

After you import the offline purchases, go to the Audience Explorer and filter users by "Products purchased offline". Make sure you see users.

If you do not see any users, make sure that the following have occurred:

• The offline purchases feed has been synced successfully.
• The identifier used in the offline purchases feed is the same identifier you use on your site.

What can you do with offline purchase data?

• Create audiences based on offline purchases and target them in relevant campaigns.
• Serve personalized recommendations using the "User Affinity" algorithm, which takes into consideration the offline purchases as well.
• Use the Purchased Together - Offline or Purchased Together - Offline and Online to leverage your offline data, in case you have a large amount of offline data.
• Avoid recommending products that the user already purchased offline.
• For every item purchased offline, an offline purchase event is fired. You can query these events in the audience explorer module.

Known limitations

• Each file can include a maximum of 1.5M rows.
• If you require more than 1.5M rows, you can upload multiple files a day, but make sure you wait until the previous upload is completed (this can take several hours, depending on the file size).
• Up to 100 files can be uploaded daily

Sample CSVs for offline transactions