Alternative Products & Upsell

Introduction

When a customer is interested in a product, it is useful to suggest alternative options they have not considered yet. For example, suggesting similar products of higher quality can increase the likelihood of a purchase and improve customer satisfaction.

Recombee addresses this use case by providing personalized recommendations of alternative products, taking into account the customer's browsing and purchase history.

Scenario Setup

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

Enter a Scenario ID. Select a distinctive label for your recommendation scenario, such as "pdp-similar-products"
Choose Recommendation type - Items to Item

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

Choose the ecommerce:similar-products logic type from the E-commerce models

This Logic will give you alternatives to the currently displayed item.

Filters

Available Products (Global Settings)

You always want to recommend only the products that are in stock. Therefore you need to apply a Filter rule to allow only such products.

As it would be tedious and prone to error to add this rule to all the Scenarios, this rule shall be added to the Global Settings, so it is always applied everywhere.

You can select a predefined rule from the Recombee Library to allow only the available products.

Depending on how you represent availability in the catalog, it can be one of the following rules:

Not deleted items - when you have a deleted property (true/false)
Available items - when you have an available property (true/false)
Items in stock [Google Merchant] - when you have a string available property with "in stock" as its value

Boosters

Tip: Upsell Booster

The Upsell Booster biases the recommender engine towards items with a higher price or margin compared to the item currently being viewed.

Navigate to the Boosters tab and Add first booster
Find Upsell and click on +
Specify which property in your Items catalog specifies price (or margin)
Set the Boosting coefficient that defines how much the more expensive items shall be pushed in the recommendations

Setting the boost to 1 implies no boost at all, and the higher the coefficient value, the higher the boost.

You can use the Preview Results function to find the most fitting value of the coefficient.

Requesting Recommendations

There are three ways to get recommendations.

No-Code Widget - create a No-Code Widget using the visual editor in the Admin UI.
Widget SDKs - use the SDK for a Carousel, Grid or Feed to display the recommendations in the design of your choice. Use the Recommend Items to Item endpoint when initializing the widget.
API SDK - request the Recommend Items to Item endpoint of the Recombee API using an SDK of your choice.

For more information, navigate to the Integration tab of the Scenario in the Admin UI.