Introduction to Recommendations

Product recommendations from Hello Retail are a way to increase order size and conversion rate by displaying relevant products as your customers browse your store.

It is a very flexible system that can be used in many ways. Here are a few examples of how product recommendations can be used.

• When viewing a product then show a list of alternatives to the current product. This will increase the conversion rate by making sure that the customer can find what they are looking for.
• After a product has been added to the cart or at the beginning of a checkout flow then show a list of accessories to the current product. This will increase the cart size by giving the customer an easy way to add relevant products to the cart.
• Show a list of products from categories the customer has shown interest in on a previous visit. This will increase the conversion rate by personalizing the front page to the customer.

Product recommendations can be configured to look any way you want and can be configured with a range of different recommendation strategies.

The recommendation strategy is the way Hello Retail chooses what products to recommend in a specific place in your shop.

> Notice:  The recommendation system is built to be able to fetch more than one product recommendation set at the same time. The system will ensure that products will not be included more than once in a set of product recommendations that are loaded in the same batch.

The Product Recommendations can be used in two main ways, Managed or Unmanaged. Both types of recommendations can be loaded using both the REST API and Javascript SDK

Managed Product Recommendations

When using the Managed Product Recommendations the product recommendation instance must be configured in the Hello Retail backend. This configuration decides how the product recommendation will behave. Among other things you can choose the algorithm for selecting products and how many products to return.

The managed product recommendations can furthermore be used in two different ways. You can either make Hello Retail render the recommended products as HTML or just return the product data as JSON. The HTML will be rendered using a liquid template that can be configured in the Hello Retail backend.

In the backend, you will also find settings that will make helloretail.js automatically inject the product recommendations into your site. This works by configuring a CSS selector in the backend. helloretail.js will look for the first element on your page that matches this CSS selector on every page load. If a matching element is found the product recommendations will automatically be rendered and injected into that element.

If you are not using the CSS selector to automatically inject the product-managed recommendations you can do it yourself by calling the loadRecom SDK method from your website.

When using the managed product recommendations you need to identify the recom configuration from the backend.

This is done using the recom box key which be found on on My Hello Retail in the Recommendations menu.

Unmanaged Product Recommendations

Unmanaged Product Recommendations can be used without configuring anything related to product recommendations in My Hello Retail. Instead, you pass information about what algorithms to use to recommend products, and how many products to return to the API. This type of product recommendation can only return the JSON representation for the recommended products.

General product recommendation box support articles, like algorithms & general setup, can be found here.