Creating a catalog
Every product in Alana Shopping lives inside a catalog. Create one to start organizing your products:
Publishing workflow
The recommended workflow for managing product content follows a fork-edit-merge pattern:
Publish a catalog
Once published, the catalog’s products appear in the public feed at /api/catalog/products.
Fork for editing
Merge changes back
Batch actions
Run pipeline stages in bulk from the catalog view or via API:
- Normalize (Silver) — field mapping, duplicate detection, image URL validation for a selection or entire catalog
- Analyze (Gold) — optimization scoring across 7 rubric stages, produces score + gaps list per product
See Batch Actions and the Pipeline API for full reference.
Pipeline settings
Customize how Silver and Gold process your products:
- Silver field mappings — map source column names to Alana schema fields
- Gold scoring weights — adjust weights per rubric stage (identity, content, media, etc.)
- Auto-trigger — automatically run Silver after Bronze, or Gold after Silver
See Pipeline Settings for the full configuration guide.
Score evolution tracking
The optimization score is tracked over time in score_history. Use this to measure the impact of content improvements — before and after running AI enhancement or batch normalize.
Catalog statistics
Each catalog tracks key metrics that help you assess content quality:
- Total products — how many products are in the catalog
- Feed-ready count — products that pass all validation rules
- Average optimization score — mean quality score across all products
- Score distribution — breakdown by excellent/good/warning/poor bands
- Last published — when the catalog was last pushed live
Aim for 100% feed-ready products before publishing. Run Batch Gold first to identify which products need the most attention.
