Website catalog field/data overrides and content formulas for SEO

Our Product Field Formulas feature allows you to override various product fields on your ecommerce websites.

When migrating product data, many fields are automatically imported to ease the load of filling out information for each product. This helps provide the correct information to your customers and offers great SEO. However, there may be some information you would prefer to appear differently, or in another way, on alternate websites, and editing each product can be impossible. With our Product Field Formulas feature, you can do bulk edits, replacing fields using foolproof formulas.

With this feature, you can change the text for your product titles, product descriptions, preview descriptions, meta descriptions, website slugs, and more.

For example, if you think your customers search for products using brand names or the manufacturer’s product number, highlight that in your product name instead of what is set in your product title.

How to bulk edit website data fields

For this tutorial, we will customize ALL product names in bulk. First, go to the Websites app and select your website. Select the Indexing tab and see the Product Fields Formulas section.

When you click “Add a line”, a pop-up will appear. First, select your Website Product Field. We will choose “Name” for this example to change our product names. As you can see, you can override many different fields, and similarly decide to pull from many other fields as sources.

You can define your content formulas, and below the data entry field are “Inputs” and “Functions” that you can use for your formulas. These formulas use a “Python-like” syntax.

For this example, we are using this formula to override the “name” for the website:
return normalize_whitespace(f'{name} {mpn}')

This formula will add the MPN number to the end of your product name. Below, the first screenshot shows the regular product name as-is, and the second screenshot shows the “override” with the MPN after the product name.

Let’s break down the formula we used to do this.
return normalize_whitespace(f'{name} {mpn}')

return is the standardized statement to create the formula’s function, and F-string (f’’) allows you to format selected parts of the formula. normalize_whitespace is listed under “Functions”. This is a way to ensure formatting is accurate/clean, just in case of extra spaces in an input. mpn and name are listed under “Inputs”; those are the MPN and product name fields that exist on the product data model.

Let’s look at another formula example for your product name. This formula will replace the entire product name with the product’s top-level brand and the MPN number.

size_of_brands_top_list = size(brands_top)
is_brands_top_list_not_empty = size_of_brands_top_list > 0
brand = brands_top[0] if is_brands_top_list_not_empty else ''

trimmed_mpn = trim(mpn)
part_number = trimmed_mpn or default_code
upper_part_number = upper(part_number)

return normalize_whitespace(f'{brand} {upper_part_number}')

This formula is broken into three parts to make it easier to read and organize. The first section is related to the product’s “brand”. The text before the equal sign (=), is a name you can use to help you define your formulas. size_of_brands_top_list uses the function size(input) and the input brands_top to retrieve the top-level brand for that product. The second line is a fallback statement in case the product does not have a brand name. The third line connects the top two lines. The top brand name will be chosen; if there is no top brand, no brand name will be displayed.

The second section relates to the product’s MPN. trimmed_mpn uses the trim(input) function (which removes any spaces at the front or end of the text) and the MPN input. The second line relates to the line above (trimmed_mpn) and includes the fallback of the default code. The last line adds the upper(input) function to the formula, which applies uppercase to the text.

The last part of the formula brings the brand and MPN, with the normalize_whitespace(input) function.

How to edit website data fields by item

You can also use these formulas to override fields for specific products. Looking at your product view, select the Website …Overrides tab. Here, you can add your overrides for each product and website.

Save and publish

Save your formulas and publish your website Pages and Products.