Enabling store-level availability or buying online pick up in-store (BOPIS) is easy to facilitate using the Constructor platform. There are a few notable options when building a product catalog to power this feature.

Defining availability metadata in a product catalog

The recommended approach is to include availability as metadata on either the item (product) or variation records when sending a catalog to Constructor.

CSV feed - API or FTP

• CSV feed format - items (products)
• CSV feed format - variations

JSON data - REST API

• Create or replace Items
• Create or replace Variations

Availability metadata should be defined as a list of stores or regions where each item (or variation) is available. In the CSV file format, these are to be delimited with a pipe character (|).

Alternatively, multiple availability data points can be defined (as individual columns, in the case of CSV) to denote specific stores or regions with TRUE or FALSE values.

Configure availability facet

Once you have uploaded your product catalog—and availability metadata—you can configure availability as a facet (filter).

A facet will allow users to filter their search or browse results by the options provided. With an availability facet, this would be choosing to view only products available in the US or online. You can also use facets in the API, such as filtering results to display availability based on the end users' geolocation.

You can configure facts using the Constructor dashboard or our API.

Hiding availability facet from end users

In many cases, it may be preferable not to show end users the newly defined availability facet. In order to do so, you'll need to set the facet's visibility to hidden. This will ensure the facet doesn't appear as a filter to your end users but still makes the information available via the API.

You will configure facet availability when you configure the facet:

Requesting results from a specific store / region

Once availability facet(s) have been configured, filters can be added to requests to ensure only items available at a specific store or region are returned.

An example search request may resemble the following:

https://ac.cnstrc.com/search/shirts?key=API_KEY&filters[availability]=store-1

Please refer to the API Reference for documentation on how to supply filters with requests to retrieve data from Constructor.