Setting up a Product Launch is an easy way for merchandisers to ensure that a product won’t be displayed to customers until a specific time. You might want to do this for a variety of reasons, like wanting to time a new product launch campaign to start on the minute, or for legal purposes (for example, a product cannot be shown before it is officially released by the manufacturer) or to make a big splash in the market.

Constructor’s platform makes it easy to set up a product for launch. There is no need to worry about waiting for an index to build, remembering to time an upload or configuring complicated rules right before the launch. All you need to do is set the date, and wait.

Setting up a product launch

To set up a product launch, you need to set the release date and time on the product in the catalog. This can be done via whichever method you are using to upload your catalog (HTTPS or FTPS). Simply add the following column to your upload (for example, to time a launch to May first at midnight PDT):

metadata:__cnstrc_release_time

The value must be formatted as an ISO date & time string, with a timezone UTC offset at the end:

(yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss.SSS±hh:mm)

A Unix epoch timestamp is also acceptable. Incorrectly formatted entries will result in a failed catalog upload with an error message containing relevant information. An entry with a missing timezone specification is assumed to be UTC.

Currently, times are only supported to the hour. Minutes and seconds will be truncated from the time submitted. As soon as the time for the specified timezone is met, the product will be returned in requests for results.

Verifying the release date

To verify the product to make sure the correct date and time are stored can be done in two ways:

Via the API

A new parameter now can be added to search and browse queries to allow you to override the desired time with a specific timestamp. This runs the query and returns the results you would see if you were to run the query at that time.

For example, to search for "cookies" and see the results as if the query was being executed on May first at one minute past midnight:

https://ac.cnstrc.com/search/cookies?key=[API key]&now=1651388460

• The now parameter requires a Unix epoch timestamp
• This query requires an API token in addition to an API key
• Setting a now parameter can only be set to future times

Via the dashboard

Release dates can be viewed in the Indexes tab of the customer dashboard. Click on the section containing the product (usually "Products"), and then search for the product. Clicking the information icon will display the attributes for the product, including the release date.