Recommendation Engine

Overview

Products can be recommended to users based off rules created by an administrator. A recommendation rule defines a product to be recommended and where it should appear.

Recommendations can appear in 3 areas throughout the user’s journey on the front-end website: the Product Detail page, the Cart page, and the My Account page. The recommendations are generated differently on each page:

Product Detail: recommendations are based off the current product being viewed.
Cart: recommendations are based off all products in the cart.
My Account: recommendations are based off all products in the cart and the users recent purchase history.

Recommendations can be targeted to an entire category, a subcategory, or a specific product.

In all cases, recommendations will exclude a product in the current view. For example, a product will not show up as a recommendation for itself in the product detail view and will not show as a recommendation in the cart if that product is already in the cart.

Adding a Recommendation

When adding a recommendation rule the following fields are available:

Recommend: The product to be recommended.
Recommended To: The targets for this recommendation; one or more categories, one or more subcategories, or a specific product.
Displayed On: The page on which to show the recommended product. Product Details, Cart, My Account, or Everywhere.
Priority: The relative priority of a recommendation. You can’t explicitly order recommendations, but higher priority recommendations always appear before lower ones.

Note that Recommend and Recommended To cannot be changed once the recommendation rule is created. Changing these would constitute a new rule, so you need to delete the current rule and create a new one if needed. All other fields can be updated.

Recommended Product Widget Location Alternative

Out of the box, the recommended products widget will show at the bottom of the product detail page.

Alternatively, the widget can be included in the [AddToCart] variable, available in the product detail template. To add the widget here, the `<recommendedproducts>` token can be placed in the html found in the `CartProductDetailsFormatString` and/or the `CartProductDetailsFormatStringBuilder` internal values, depending on which editor you choose to use. This token, like the others, is case sensitive.