Recommendations Basics

How Do Product Recommendations Work in Rejoiner?

Recommendations are made up of the best selling, most viewed and newest products across your entire catalogue as defined by your customers purchase behavior.

Our recommendation algorithm predicts what products your customers are most likely to buy next and intelligently serves these items in your email creative. We've made it very easy to recommend products based on browse activity and cart data to help you increase your CTR and revenue per email.

If you'd like to learn more about how to strategize your recommendations click here

Recommendation Settings

We've made it very simple to manage your recommendations in the application via your account's Recommendation Settings.

There you will be able to change the following:

1. Aggregation Timeline (days back): this setting allows you to manage the timeframe which the app should consider in order to define your catalogue's top sellers.
2. Products to Exclude: this setting is useful for suppressing items that you do not want to recommend.

Aggregation Timeframe

This setting helps us determine the timeframe you'd like to use for your product recommendations.

The default is All Time where we look at your all time products. You are able to change this setting to a more fitting timeframe depending on your business type and product catalog.

So for example, if you would like your top_sellers recommendations to reflect the last month only, you should select the timeframe of Last Month to make sure that we're injecting the overall top sellers of the last 30 days.

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After making your selection you will need to save your recommendation settings.

Excluding Products

You can suppress certain items that you do not wish to feature in your recommendations.

1. Go into the Product Exclusions section of your Recommendation Settings.
2. Start by typing the product product_id (SKU) you wish to suppress. A list of available items under the product_id you type in the search will populate to help you make a selection.
   
   You can either select from the list or add a product to the suppression list by typing the product_id. Note that the list is case-sensitive.
   
   The product information of the items you suppress will be visible in your Excluded Products list. You can always click on the x next to the product tag in order to remove the product from the suppression list.
   
   Note: The product exclusion feature will only auto-populate for products that have been viewed.
3. Once your suppression list is ready, you'll need to save your recommendation settings. Otherwise, you will lose your changes.

Extract Product IDs/Categories

Products are generally injected into the template as a list of items, whether that comes from recommendations, cart items, or viewed items. There are several additional filters and tags which accept a comma separated list of product ids or categories.

To allow for using these lists of items as parts of these filters, the following two filters are available:

1. extract_product_ids
2. extract_categories

These can be used like so:

Example Usage

# Get the site top sellers from the same categories as the customer's cart items:
{% recommendations "top_sellers" use_cart=True as top_sellers %}

# Get items viewed together with items the customer viewed, excluding the top-sellers from the previous recommendations:
{% recommendations "viewed_together" use_browsed=True exclude_product_ids=top_sellers|extract_product_ids|join:"," as viewed_excluding_top_sellers %}

Recommendation Taxonomies

Product recommendations have different types, which we will refer to as "taxonomies." Below is a listing of the types available, their definition, and their type usage.

Recommendations Template Tag

The recommendations template tag is very flexible and powerful and should be able to provide you with the ability to insert some recommended products based on your specifications. The template tag has one required parameter which is the taxonomy as described in the section above.

Additionally, the template tag should always end with as VARIABLE_NAME. The variable name can be whatever you want, however, the recommendations tag will not be able to be used without it.

Basic Example: Global Top Sellers

{% recommendations "top_sellers" as recommended_items %}

After including the above tag in your template, you are now able to include data from recommended products documented in the Template Tag Attributes section.

Additionally, the recommendations tag takes several options that are not required, but provide enhanced capabilities.

Complex Examples:

# Top Sellers in the same categories as cart items
{% recommendations "top_sellers" use_cart=True as recommended_items %}

# Products Purchased Together with cart items, including products the customer viewed
{% recommendations "purchased_together" use_cart=True exclude_browsed=False as recommended_items %}

# 6 Most Viewed Products in a specific category excluding a specific product id
{% recommendations "most_viewed" categories="vip-items" exclude_product_ids="super-vip-item" count=6 as recommended_items %}

Template Tag Attributes

The recommendations tag above registers an array of products into the variable name you defined in the template tag (as VARIABLE_NAME). Each of these products have the following attributes that you are able to insert into your template. The table below assumes you have a product in the variable item by doing something similar to the following:

{% recommendations "top_sellers" as recommended_items %}
{% for item in recommended_items %}
Use {{ item.TAG }} here...
{% endfor %}