You’re not alone with your questions – We’re happy to help

We personalise on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning is used here in combination with data mining. For this, a knowledge base is created that is enriched with the user behaviour of the customers, your product catalogue and your expertise. The intelligent algorithms use this data to establish a 1:1 communication with online shoppers. You can find more information under Technology.

We offer five products for personalising the entire digital customer journey: Search, Advise, Inspire, Stream and Connect.
You can book each of these five products individually. We determine the price using our transparent pricing model, which is based on the traffic of your online shop. To be able to send you an offer, we need the following (monthly) data from you: search queries, orders, opened newsletters.

There is a setup fee and a monthly rental fee. The setup fee is only payable once. For the provision of our services you pay a monthly fee. This includes maintenance, high-end hosting and of course the use of our services for the agreed term. There is a one-time setup fee and a monthly usage fee.

We currently work with online shops from 40 countries. We support every language with UTF-8 encoding.

Unfortunately, you cannot host our products yourself. Our products are only available as SaaS (Software as a Service). This means that the latest version is always available to each of our customers.

A/B tests are possible in principle. The best thing to do is to contact us and we will help you to carry out the A/B test.

epoq Search is suitable for you if you have more than 5,000 search queries per month in your online shop and your range has more than 500 products.

The filters are limited to the fields that are available in the catalogue. Here it is important that there are no spelling mistakes in the filter names and that the filter values are well filled.

Example: If the online shopper is to have the option of filtering his search result by colour, the attribute colour should be available in the catalogue. Therefore, each product should have this attribute assigned accordingly. If an item does not have a colour assignment, it cannot be found by selecting a colour filter.

Semantic search is based on intelligent algorithms that examine the relationship between words, sentences and texts. The aim is to find out what the online shopper’s intention is when he or she enters a search term. This knowledge is then used to display the appropriate search results.

epoq Advise is suitable for your online shop if

• you have product categories that contain products requiring explanation and these fulfil different requirements.
• you want to offer quality advice, as in stationary retail.
• you want to save your customers phone calls and reading time.

The more detailed the Guided Selling is to advise your customer, the more detailed you should also hand over the attributes within your product catalogue.

epoq Inspire is suitable for you if you have more than 1,000 orders per month and your range has more than 1,000 products.

With epoq Inspire, it is important that the attributes to be applied to filters are present.

Example: If you want to display a recommendation widget with cross-selling articles (products from other categories), the attribute Category should be present and filled accordingly. Depending on how detailed you want to display the category filter, the categories or category levels should be broken down in great detail.

epoq Connect is suitable for you if the emails sent to your customers are opened more than 25,000 times a month and your product range has more than 1,000 products.

Since the display of recommendations in the newsletter is controlled by us in most cases, it is important that all displayed fields are also available in the catalogue. Here it is very important that you provide us with image URLs that display the images in the appropriate size for the newsletter.

Example: If strike prices are to be displayed, the original price and the reduced price must be available in the catalogue.

We retrieve the product catalogue at least once a day. Depending on the catalogue content and the importance of up-to-dateness, it may also be necessary to retrieve the catalogue several times a day.

In general, you should make the catalogue file available on an http or ftp server. If necessary, you can secure the catalogue file with a standard authentication.

When importing into our knowledge base, the following information should be included in any case:

• A clear identification of the product
• The name of the product
• The absolute URL to the product detail page
• The current price in euros
• The absolute URL to the small product picture
• The description of the product

Data collected in the past can of course be used. The more data we are provided with, the better our services can perform right from the start.

Categories are usually structured hierarchically. This hierarchy should be shown in the catalogue, preferably with the character “>”.

Example: “Home > Textiles

If you want to write several values in one field, e.g. in the field “Category”, you can separate the individual categories with a separate character:

Example: The product “Pillow” is in the category “Home > Textiles” and in the category “Bedding”. You can fill the field in the catalogue as follows: “Home > Textiles | Bedding”.

If you maintain main products and variants in your product range, a few things must be taken into account during integration. In general, you should tell us for each product whether it is a variant or a main product. This information should be available in the catalogue.

We recommend the following:
If there are different sizes and colour versions of a product, then:

• each colour version should be available as a separate product in the catalogue export. This product should contain a reference to the main product (variantOf=) and show the available sizes: “Size:Available quantity:Price#Size:Available quantity:Price#Size:Available quantity:Price”. If a size was available but the stock is at 0, it should be exported that way.
• when viewing an item, the respective main product ID should be transmitted (productId=&variantOf=).
• when changing the shopping basket and purchasing an item, the main product ID and also the item ID are transmitted(productId=&variantOf=).
• either main products or colour variants are displayed as recommendations.

If you want to give us the availability of each item size individually (e.g. to make optimal use of the “size” filter in epoq Search), you can pass the field “available sizes”:

Please note that the sizes should be named consistently (e.g. only S, M, L, etc. and not S, M, 38, 40,…).

It is up to you how detailed you specify colours. The more detailed you specify the colours, the better the search will work. However, if you specify your colour in detail, e.g. “sky blue”, “dark blue”, etc., you should pass an additional field containing the parent colour, in this case “blue”.

In principle, for larger and/or frequently changing catalogues (or article states), we offer to transfer individual articles via so-called DELTA updates.

The structure of the file should correspond exactly to the structure of the normal (FULL) catalogue file. If deletions are also to be mapped here, there should be a column called “deleted”, which should be filled with “1” in the corresponding lines.

If the DELTA is to be fetched via an http link, we recommend keeping exactly one DELTA file, which will be supplemented until the next FULL update is created.

If an (s)FTP server is used for exchange, several DELTA files (e.g. per hour or per cycle) can also be created, which you should mark with a timestamp. Ideally, these should be in a separate subfolder called “DELTA”.

The integration takes place via a line of Javascript that can be conveniently integrated into your online shop. This connects your online shop to the knowledge base through which the intelligent algorithms establish 1:1 communication with your online shoppers.

Our products are compatible with every shop system and e-mail dispatch system and are easy to integrate.

We need about 2 weeks lead time for a project. After that, we need another 2-6 weeks until the product is integrated into your online shop.

Yes, our products are displayed equally on all end devices.

The epoq Control Desk is the backend of our software services: epoq Search, epoq Advise, epoq Inspire, epoq Stream and epoq Connect. It serves as a reporting, analysis and management tool. Our Control Desk is available to all existing epoq customers free of charge. Several users can be assigned to one company.

You do not need any special technical knowledge for our control desk. Your e-commerce knowledge from your daily work with your online shop should be sufficient to understand and evaluate the reports or to view qualitative analyses. Detailed instructions and examples are available in the settings area.

The Control Desk is ideal for quantitative performance control of the epoq products integrated in the online shop. It also offers qualitative analysis tools from which suitable measures can be derived and set directly in the management area. There are three central application scenarios: Evaluation of quantitative performance indicators (KPIs), analysis of qualitative performance characteristics and setting individual service configurations. You can find more information about the Control Desk and the individual functions in our blog, in the category Control Desk.

The Control Desk is available in German and English. You can change the language in the toolbar at the top right under “Settings”.

As a customer, you should have received an invitation to the Control Desk by e-mail from us at the beginning of your term. You can use the link in the e-mail to create a password for yourself with your business e-mail address. With your email address and password, you can log in at the following link:

http://controldesk.epoq.de/#/login

The login data consists of your business e-mail address and your self-created password.

Go to the login page and click on the “Forgot your password” link. Enter your email address and we will send you an email with further instructions on how to reset your password.

Normally, the e-mail address corresponds to your business e-mail address. If this is not the case because you have changed your email address once under “Account settings”, then simply write to us at kundenbetreuung@epoq.de.

You can contact our customer service at any time by e-mail at kundenbetreuung@epoq.de or by phone at +49 (0) 07243 20 01 0.