Overview

Akeneo Activation enables you to distribute enhanced content — created in a third-party system — to your retailer and marketplace channels. Activation fetches, stores, and transforms your enhanced content to meet the specific requirements of each destination channel. The primary supported format is A+ Content (standard) for Amazon.

The screenshot above shows the enhanced content distribution workflow in Akeneo Activation, illustrating how content flows from a third-party creation tool through the PIM and into the destination channel.

The distribution workflow for enhanced content follows three stages:

• Creation: Enhanced content is built in a third-party application connected to the Akeneo ecosystem.
• Association: The content is sent to your Akeneo PIM and associated with the relevant products or product families.
• Distribution: The content is mapped within an Akeneo Activation catalog and distributed to the destination channel.

End-to-end workflow

The steps below cover the complete process, from creating your content to verifying its delivery at the destination channel.

1. Create enhanced content in a third-party system

To distribute enhanced content with Akeneo Activation, start by creating your content in a compatible external application. The Plezio Pitch app by Sitation is a supported third-party tool for enhanced content creation that connects directly to Akeneo Activation. The general process is:

1. Launch the application from your Akeneo PIM's Connect menu.
2. Create a new layout and give it a name.
3. Select the Akeneo PIM Family you want to use as a data source to populate the layout.
4. Build the layout content blocks, ensuring they meet the destination channel's specifications — for example, Amazon's A+ Content requirements for image sizes.
5. Populate the content blocks by fetching data from your Akeneo PIM Attributes or external URLs.
6. Save the layout. Use a PIM product UUID to preview the final document and validate it against different products within the Family.
7. Publish the completed layout to your PIM.

The animation above shows the layout creation and publishing flow in the Plezio Pitch app, including the layout editor, content block configuration, and the publish action that sends the layout to the Akeneo PIM.

2. Manage content layouts in the PIM

Once published from the third-party application, the enhanced content layout is saved in your Akeneo PIM as a Reference Entity. The key identifier for this layout is the layoutID Attribute, stored within the Reference Entity record.

The animation above shows the enhanced content Reference Entity in Akeneo PIM, with the layoutID Attribute visible inside the record.

3. Associate enhanced content with products

To link an enhanced content layout to the appropriate products in your Akeneo PIM, complete the following steps:

1. Create a PIM Attribute: In your Akeneo PIM, create a new Attribute to store the association.
2. Set the Attribute type: Use Reference Entity single select or Reference Entity multi-select, depending on whether you need to associate one or multiple layouts per product.
3. Assign the Attribute to a Family: Add the newly created Attribute to the product Family that will use the enhanced content.
4. Associate the layout: In a product's edit form, select the enhanced content layout(s) in the new Attribute field. You can do this manually per product, or automate it using bulk actions, the rules engine, or Collaboration Workflows.

The animation above shows a product edit form in Akeneo PIM, with a Reference Entity Attribute being used to associate an enhanced content layout with a product.

4. Map enhanced content in an Activation catalog

With the enhanced content associated to products in the PIM, map the content in Akeneo Activation:

1. In Activation, go to your channel and open an existing catalog or create a new one.
2. Go to the Mapping page.
3. In the target Attribute search bar, search for A+ Document Template ID.
4. As the PIM source, select the Reference Entity Attribute you created in step 3.
5. In the dropdown that appears, select the specific Reference Entity Attribute that stores the layout identifier: layoutID.
6. Complete the mapping for any other required Attributes.
7. Click Save.

The animation above shows the Activation catalog mapping page with the A+ Document Template ID target mapped to a Reference Entity Attribute, and layoutID selected as the source.

5. Distribute content via Activation

Once the mapping is saved, Activation fetches the complete enhanced content layout file associated with your products, along with all the data composing the layout. You can verify the association in the Products tab of your Activation channel.

To distribute the enhanced content, launch the export job from the main task launcher in Activation.

6. Verify at the destination

Confirm that the enhanced content has been successfully delivered and associated with the correct products on the destination channel. For example, to verify A+ Content for Amazon, log in to your Amazon Seller Central account and check the A+ Content manager to see if the new content appears.

You can create, update, and redistribute enhanced content as often as needed by repeating this workflow.

The animation above shows the A+ Content manager in Amazon Seller Central, where you can verify that the enhanced content distributed via Akeneo Activation has been successfully associated with the corresponding product.

Related resources

• Amazon channel guide — for the Amazon-specific workflow of importing existing A+ Content properties from Amazon directly into your PIM