Once your catalogue is connected, your AI can answer questions about what you sell — recommending items in conversation, showing product cards in chat, and quoting prices and stock that are always current. You set this up once at Brand → Products.
Pick the right kind of source
There are two kinds, and you choose when you create the source. You cannot change the kind afterwards — switching means adding a new source, so it is worth a moment's thought.
| Product API | CSV feed | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Your shop serves its products as JSON at an address we read | A Google Shopping style CSV file we download |
| Your shop can send us changes instantly | Yes | No |
| Can carry product rules | Yes — only this kind can | No |
| Your own fields (ingredients, dosage, anything) | Yes | No |
If you sell anything where the wording is regulated — supplements, medicines, cosmetics — you want a Product API source, because it is the only one that can carry product rules. A CSV feed is simpler and perfectly fine for an ordinary shop.
1. Add the source
Open Brand → Products and press Add source. Give it a name and the address we should read your products from. A Product API address must start with https://; a CSV feed may use plain http.
Leave Read it straight away switched on and the first read begins as soon as you save.
2. Choose how often we read it
Set Read every … days to anything from 1 to 30. Daily is the default and suits most shops.
On a Product API source you can also switch scheduled reading off entirely and let your shop push changes to us instead — useful when your catalogue changes constantly and you would rather tell us than have us keep asking.
3. Decide what happens if it breaks
Under If the source keeps failing, pick one:
- Keep serving the last products we read — your AI carries on recommending what it already knows, which may have gone out of date. This is the default.
- Hide the products until it works again — the products disappear from your AI and from product cards, and come back on the next successful read.
This only takes effect after three failed reads in a row. Before that, we simply keep retrying every hour.
What your AI does and does not learn
Each product becomes one searchable piece of text — its title, brand, category, description and any of your own fields.
Price, sale price and stock are never stored as something the AI learned. They are read at the exact moment an answer is written, so the number in your AI's sentence and the number on the product card beside it can never disagree. Two useful consequences:
- Changing a price costs nothing and needs no refresh.
- You refresh a source to add and remove products, not to correct prices — those were already right.
Checking it worked
The source's row shows a status. ACTIVE means the last read succeeded, and the Products column tells you how many arrived. Press the chart icon for the full report of the last run — how many items arrived, how many were added or updated, and anything that was skipped and why.
If it did not go well, see when a product source stops working.
Who can do this
You need the Content sources permission — the same one that covers the AI sources on Brand → Knowledge. If you could open the Products page before and cannot now, that is why: the page used to sit under the Vex AI permission and has moved.
Next, if your products need controlled wording, read what product rules are.