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Import insight data

Bulk upload essential data, such as your orders and product catalogs.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over 3 months ago

Insight data powers your ecommerce features, such as RFM personas, the retail dashboard and reporting, product recommendations, and more.

We designed the import Insight data tool to help you get started using your account as quickly as possible.


Before you start

Things you need to know:

  • You must have the Insight data importer enabled on your account.

    To do this, contact your Customer Success representative.

  • Your contacts must already exist. Importing Insight data doesn't create new contact records.

  • You need to download an SFTP client to connect to our SFTP server.
    Some popular SFTP clients:


1. Create an SFTP user

You need to create an SFTP user to authenticate your connection to our SFTP server.

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Access > SFTP users.

  2. Select NEW USER. We automatically generate a unique user email address for you.

  3. Enter a description to tell the difference between multiple users.

  4. Enter and confirm a password.

  5. For Status, select Enabled to activate the user.

  6. Select SAVE.


2. Upload the file to the SFTP server

At this point, we've created a new folder for you, and this page tells you the folder's file path where you must upload your import file.

The Insight data file must be in JSON format. To see the data schema you should follow for specific Insight data collections, check out Data schemas.

To upload your file to the SFTP server:

  1. In Dotdigital, copy the folder path.

  2. Open your SFTP client, and connect using:

    • The username and password you created in Step 1.

    • Port 22.

  3. In your SFTP client, use the copied path to go to the new folder.

  4. In the new folder, upload your Insight data file.

  5. Go back to Dotdigital, and under the label SFTP file, select the Refresh icon.

    You should now see your imported file in the SFTP files list.

  6. Expand the SFTP file drop-down menu, and select the file you want to upload.

  7. For Encoding type, expand the encoding type drop-down menu and select the type of encoding you want to use.

  8. For Email address, enter an email address to receive a notification when your import finishes.

    Separate multiple email address with a comma.

  9. For Name, enter a name to identify your import.

  10. Select NEXT.


3. Schedule the import

On the schedule page, you choose the frequency you want to the import to run. The import includes all files that are in the SFTP folder path.

  1. On the Schedule import page, for Frequency, select when you want the import to run.
    There are four frequency options:

    • Immediately
      The import starts running within 1 min of inserting a file into the SFTP folder path.

    • Hourly
      Set the exact minutes past the hour when you want the import to run.

    • Daily
      Set the time of day the import runs.

    • Weekly
      Select a day or multiple days of the week, and set the time of day that the import runs.

  2. Select SAVE.

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