Personalized Re-ordering of Sections (Advanced)

Introduction

Create a truly personalized homepage by selecting the top categories for each user and displaying a dedicated box for each, featuring the most appealing products from those categories tailored to their preferences.

In order to achieve this level of personalization, you need to take the two following steps:

1. Get a list of categories for the user in personalized order
2. For each row, request products from the particular category

Categories

In the first step, we will acquire the personalized order of categories for the particular user.

Segmentation Setup

Start by creating Segmentation of the products based on their category.

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Segmentations section and choose Create.

1. Choose Segmentation Type - Property-based
2. Pick Property from the list that determines the category

After picking the property, a preview opens up, and you can see what categories exist in your catalog and the number of items per category.

Then confirm the settings by hitting the Create button.

You have now created the Segmentation based on category, and you can proceed to recommend the categories (=Segments) to the user.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

1. Enter a Scenario ID, such as "homepage-categories"
2. Choose Recommendation type - Item Segments to User
3. Continue and choose Results Segmentation - categories Segmentation created in the previous step

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

• Choose the recombee:default logic type from the Universal Models

This particular Logic returns the Segments (=categories) in personalized order to give the user the top categories according to the user’s previous interactions.

Requesting Recommendations

You shall request the Recommend Items Segments to User endpoint of the Recombee API using an SDK of your choice.

You will get a list of recommended categories that define the order of the category rows and that you will use in the next step to recommend products from these categories.

Products From the Categories

Now we will fill the individual rows with products from the particular categories.

There will be a Recommend Items to User request for each created row.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

1. Enter a Scenario ID, such as "homepage-products-per-category"
2. Choose Recommendation type - Items to User

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

• Choose the ecommerce:homepage logic type from the E-commerce models to recommend products based on the user’s browsing and purchasing history

This Logic gives a personalized offering for the user and motivates the user to proceed with buying products that were of interest during previous visits.

Filters

Show Only Products from the Particular Category (Dynamic)

Each Recommend Items to User request shall display products from a particular category (according to the list obtained in the previous part of this tutorial).

You will set the filter parameter parameter of the Recommend Items to User API requests.

The ReQL expression may look like this:

"<the particular category>" in item_segments("<ID of categories Segmentation from the 1st step>", 'itemId')

Example for a Mobile Phones category:

"Mobile Phones" in item_segments("categories", 'itemId')

More Filters

Requesting Recommendations

You can send all the Recommend Items to User requests (one for each row) inside a single Batch request using an SDK of your choice.

Don’t forget to set the category filter (see the previous section).

Once you receive the products for all the rows, you can show the user the top products from the user’s most favorite categories.