Products Catalog
Lets your agent search your products, look them up by SKU, list them by category, and share live prices and stock right in the chat.
This guide begins with What Products Catalog does, continues through What it can do for you, How to set it up and use it, Anything to connect?, and finishes with Filling the catalog from a product feed.
What Products Catalog does
Products Catalog gives your agent real knowledge of your product line. Once it is installed, your agent can search your products, pull up a specific item by its SKU, and list what you sell by category, then share the current price and stock level right there in the conversation.
It reads from the exact same catalog you already manage inside Botonom under Tools > Products. There is no store account to link and no outside login. The skill reads your own Botonom product catalog and answers from it live, at the moment a customer asks.
If you already sell on Google or Meta, you do not have to type that catalog in again: paste the product feed URL you already give Google Merchant Center or Meta Catalog under Tools > Products > Feeds and it fills itself, then stays in sync on a schedule.
What it can do for you
The skill does three concrete things, and every answer it gives comes back with the current price and stock:
- Search your catalog by keyword. A visitor can ask in plain language, for example "do you have any wireless headphones?", and the agent matches that against your product names, SKUs, descriptions, and categories, then returns the matching items with price and availability.
- Look up one product by SKU. When someone quotes an exact product code, or you want precise details on a single item, the agent fetches the full record for that SKU.
- List and browse by category. The agent can list your products, optionally narrowed to a single category, and it can also tell a visitor which categories exist so they can browse what you offer.
- Share live price and availability. Prices and stock come from your catalog at the time of the reply, so customers see what is true now rather than an old snapshot.
Those are the three things it does in a customer conversation: it reads and recommends, and it never changes your product data.
For workspace owners and admins there is a little more. The agent can also report on your product feeds: which feeds you have, when each last synced, how many items it carried, and what a given import created, updated or skipped. That is how it can answer "why is this product missing?" or "why is this price still the old one?". It can also ask a feed to refresh. It cannot add, edit or delete a feed; where your catalog comes from is a decision you make in the panel.
How to set it up and use it
Getting started takes about five minutes:
- Open the Skill Marketplace in Botonom and find Products Catalog (in the E-commerce category).
- Click Install and choose which of your hired agents should use it, for example a Sales Assistant or a Support Agent. It is enabled instantly.
- Make sure your products are entered under Tools > Products. Your agent can only talk about items that exist in your catalog.
After that, your customers (or you) can just ask naturally. A few realistic examples:
User: Do you sell wireless headphones?
Agent: Yes. We have 2 in stock right now:
- AeroPods Lite (SKU HP-101) - $79, 14 in stock
- StudioMax Over-Ear (SKU HP-220) - $149, 3 in stock
User: What's the price on SKU HP-220?
Agent: StudioMax Over-Ear (HP-220) is $149 and we have 3 in stock.
User: Show me everything in the Coffee category.
Agent: Here is what we carry under Coffee:
- Morning Blend 250g (COF-01) - $12, in stock
- Espresso Dark 1kg (COF-09) - $34, in stock
We also stock Tea and Accessories if you want to browse those.
Anything to connect?
No. This is one of the skills with nothing to plug in.
Unlike skills that link an outside account through a "Connect & Install" screen (such as Meta Ads, Google Analytics, Business Central, or Zoho CRM) or that ask you to paste an API key or token (such as ElevenLabs or IKAS Commerce), Products Catalog reads the catalog that already lives inside your Botonom workspace. There is no OAuth window and no token to copy in.
The only setup is:
- Install the skill and assign it to an agent from the Skill Marketplace.
- Keep your catalog current in Tools > Products: add products, set prices, and update stock as things change. If you sell on Google or Meta, Tools > Products > Feeds can do that filling for you from the feed URL you already have.
Filling the catalog from a product feed
Typing a few hundred products in by hand is nobody's idea of a good afternoon. If you already advertise on Google or Meta you have a product feed: a URL your store publishes that lists everything you sell. Botonom reads that same file.
Go to Tools > Products > Feeds, press Add Feed, and paste the exact URL you gave Google Merchant Center or Meta Catalog. We read the global standard (RSS with the g: namespace, Atom, or CSV/TSV with the same column names), so there is no Botonom-specific format to produce.
Before anything is written, press Test read. It downloads and parses the feed and shows you what it found: how many products, how many are usable, which rows were skipped and why, and a sample of the first items exactly as your agent will see them. Nothing touches your catalog until you are happy with that.
After that it refreshes on the schedule you pick (every 6 hours up to weekly). A few things are worth knowing, because they are what keep a feed from ever costing you work:
- Anything you edit by hand stays edited. Correct a product's name or price in the panel and that field is locked. Later imports refresh everything else and leave your correction alone.
- Products that vanish from the feed are never deleted. By default they are marked out of stock, so past orders keep their product and nothing disappears from your history.
- A broken feed cannot wipe your catalog. If a sync suddenly returns far fewer products than usual, Botonom refuses to retire the missing ones and reports the run as partial instead.
- A price we cannot read for certain is skipped, not guessed. "1.500" means one and a half in some countries and fifteen hundred in others. Rather than risk quoting the wrong price, the row is skipped and shown to you; set the decimal separator on the feed and re-run.
- Hand-entered products are not disturbed. If a feed item matches a product you typed in yourself, it is linked rather than overwritten, and the text you wrote is locked.
You can watch every import under the feed's History, and press Sync now any time you do not want to wait for the schedule.
Good to know and limits
A few honest boundaries so you know exactly what to expect:
- It is read-only today. The skill can find, look up, and list products, but it cannot add, edit, or delete products, cannot change stock levels, and cannot take an order or run a checkout. Taking orders and moving stock is handled by a separate skill (Orders / Sales).
- Cost price stays private. Your products can carry a cost price next to the sell price. The agent only ever shares the sell price with customers. The cost price is visible only to workspace owners and admins, so a visitor can never see what an item cost you.
- Your data stays in your workspace. The skill decides which catalog to read from your agent's own signed identity, never from anything a visitor types. One company's agent can never read another company's products.
- Accuracy follows your catalog. Prices and stock are only as correct as what you keep in Tools > Products. Keep it current and the agent stays accurate.