Storefront setup and concepts

To effectively track commerce events, use the Commerce API, and manage product discovery through the CMH, you need to set up your storefronts in a way that’s compatible with Coveo.

In Coveo for Commerce, storefronts are organized into properties, and each property can support multiple locales. For example, if you have two storefronts—one in Canada and one in the United States—your Coveo setup would include two properties, one for each storefront.

Each property can have multiple locales. For example, if your Canadian storefront supports both English and French, you would have two locales under the Canadian property: en-CA-CAD and fr-CA-CAD. Each storefront/locale combination would have its own commerce catalog representing the products available for that specific combination.

The following diagram shows how the Barca brand’s storefront architecture could be set up in Coveo for Commerce, considering the following variations:

A Coveo organization can serve many ecommerce sites or applications, but all of the events in a user’s journey should be tied together for accurate data analytics and consistency.

tracking IDs segregate the data gathered from each of these sites or applications to ensure personalized and relevant output from your Coveo Machine Learning (Coveo ML) models, usable reporting, and clear merchandising actions. Each tracking ID points to a specific storefront, creating a way to bucket events that belong to different user journeys.

The tracking ID is defined when sending events to the Coveo Platform. Interfaces built with the Coveo Headless library or Atomic library automatically include the tracking ID in the events they send. While tracking ID values are specified when sending usage analytics events, each value that’s sent must be registered using a Property in your Coveo organization. See Properties for more information.

In the context of the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH), the management of the product discovery solutions is segmented by tracking ID. This means that merchandising actions, such as boosting products or creating rules, are specific to each tracking ID.

See What’s a tracking ID? for more information about tracking IDs.

Properties allow the management of tracking IDs within a Coveo organization. A property consists of a user-readable display name that simplifies the management and analysis of data across different sites or applications.

More precisely, you must use properties to:

While tracking ID values are specified when sending usage analytics events, properties are managed through the Properties (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page of the Coveo Administration Console.

Each tracking ID used in your usage analytics events must be registered as a property in your Coveo organization to allow for proper data tracking and interpretation.

If a tracking ID is sent in an event but isn’t registered, the event will still be logged, though it will appear as Invalid in the Event browser. This means that the tracking ID wasn’t recognized as a property, preventing accurate data segmentation and making it harder to analyze the source of the event.

For more information on how to manage properties, see Properties.

A given ecommerce site or application can support many languages, countries, and/or currencies, resulting in variations in product attributes like names, descriptions, and prices.

The Coveo Platform addresses this complexity by utilizing locales to distinguish unique combinations of language, country, and currency.

Locales are defined by a combination of the values of the language, country, and currency codes sent in Commerce API requests.

Locales allow for reporting according to the language, country, and currency of the user’s experience, as well as managing product discovery solutions for each language, country, and currency permutation within the Coveo Merchandising Hub (CMH).

Locales are defined for every potential combination of supported language, country, and currency that your ecommerce sites or applications support.

There’s a 1:1 relationship between a Catalog source and commerce catalog. This means that you should have a combination of a Catalog source and a commerce catalog for each language, country, currency, and brand you’re selling your products in.

A single tracking ID can apply to multiple locale combinations. For example, if you have a tracking ID identifying a storefront for a brand that sells products in both English and French in Canada, you would have a single tracking ID associated with two locales: en-CA-CAD and fr-CA-CAD.

Storefront associations let you manage the relationship between properties, locales, and commerce catalogs.

This allows the Coveo Platform to automatically infer the catalog ID targeted by a property and locale combination. So, there’s no need to specify the catalog ID when authenticating commerce requests.

For more information on storefront associations, see Storefront associations.

To properly manage the properties, locales, and storefront associations in your Coveo organization and data tracking, you’ll typically follow these steps: