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 claims and instructions | Yes — only this kind can | Only instructions set to every product |
| Your own fields (ingredients, dosage, anything) | Yes | No |
| Groups flavors and sizes under one product | Yes | No — every row becomes its own product |
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 claims and instructions. 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- Keep serving the last products we read — your AI carries on recommending what it already knows, which may have gone out of date.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.
One product, several versions
A product is the thing you talk about — "Gold Whey". A version is the thing a customer buys — "Gold Whey, pistachio, 1 kg" — with its own price, stock and link.
If you sell something in one form only, it simply has one version and you never think about it. If you sell it in eight flavors and three sizes, that is one product with up to twenty-four versions — which is why your AI can say "we have it in eight flavors" instead of listing the same thing eight times as if they were different products.
In chat, a product with several versions shows its options on the card (Flavor: 8 · Size: 3) and a from price. Once the conversation narrows to one choice, the card becomes that exact version, with its own price.
Only a Product API source can group versions. In a CSV file every row is a separate product, so eight flavors arrive as eight products.
Categories can have levels
A product's category can be a path rather than a single label — Protein > Whey > Isolate, up to six levels deep. Your AI uses that shape to answer questions about your shop as a whole: "what kinds of protein do you have?" is answered from your real categories, with each category's products most popular first, rather than from whichever handful of products a search happened to find.
Most popular, ratings and what's new
When your AI lists products from your catalogue, it uses one order, called most popular: products with a priority come first, in priority order, then the rest by popularity, and products that are out of stock always come last. It shows up to five of them in full, says how many there are in total, and the visitor can ask for more. A question about your best, top, best-selling or trending products is answered with this same order.
A Product API source can send these figures for each product and each version:
- Priority — puts products first in every list, and your AI presents that order as your most popular products. Set it only on products you are happy to see presented that way.
- Popularity — a number your shop sends, for example from your sales, that orders the products without a priority; the higher it is, the earlier the product comes. Only the order is used, and the number itself is never shown. A version's popularity lets your AI say which flavor or size is the most popular.
- A rating with its number of reviews and the day it was added to your shop — so your AI can list the highest rated or the newest products when a visitor asks. Without them, it never calls a product highest rated or new.
A CSV feed cannot send these. Asking for the cheapest or the most expensive works for every source, from your prices.
What your AI does and does not learn
Each product becomes searchable text — its title, brand, category, every option value, the words you send to help people find it, and your own fields. A product that carries a lot is split into several searchable pieces so nothing is cut off.
Price, sale price and stock are never stored as something the AI learned. They live on each version and 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 claims and instructions explained — or see How your AI talks about your products for the rules it follows on its own.