Creating a New Recommendations Profile

When you're ready to create recommendations, you'll start by creating a recommendations profile.

Note: The profile editor has been updated. To see a walk-through of the new profile editor, click here.

Create New Profile

On the Personalized Recommendations page, click the "+ Add New Profile" button.

Page Placement

Choose where you intend to place this profile on your store, then click the "Next" button. This will determine the types of recommendations that will be available to you. In this example, we'll choose "Product Detail Page".

Recommendations Type

Choose the type of recommendation you wish to use for this profile. The selected type will determine the logic used when generating recommendations for your site. Click the "Create Profile" button to continue.

Note: Some profile types, such as "Trending" or "Custom", require an additional selection before the profile is created. The selection window will open automatically for you to make your choice before clicking the "Create Profile" button.

During the initial selection process, you can click the navigation at the top of the window to go back to a previous step and modify your choices.

Once you click "Create Profile" and open the Profile Editor, you can click the breadcrumbs at the top left to update the page placement and recommendation type, as long as you have not clicked the "Save Profile" button at the bottom right. Once the profile has been saved, you cannot modify the recommendation type or placement.

When selecting a recommendation type, think about how you want shoppers to behave when viewing these recommendations: do you want to upsell them to a similar product from your house brand? Do you want to recommend complementary products that are regularly bought with the products they have in their cart? A detailed list of supported recommendations types can be found below.

Supported Recommendations Types

• Cross-sell recommendations are products that a shopper is likely to buy in addition to the product that they’re currently viewing.
• Cart Cross-sell recommendations are products that are complementary to the products in the shoppers' cart.
• Search Cross-sell recommendations are items that are complementary to products in search.

What’s the difference among Cross-sell, Cart Cross-sell, and Search Cross-sell? Cross-sell is used on a Product Detail Page to recommend products that go well with one product — the product that the shopper is viewing. Cart Cross-sell recommends products that go well with multiple products, which is valuable for basket pages. Search Cross-sell recommends products that go well with the products that have been searched.

• Similar recommendations are products that a shopper should consider buying as an alternative to the product they’re currently viewing. Similar recommendations can be configured to promote products that are at higher prices using the Upsell Filter in your Recommendations Settings.
• Personal recommendations are products that a specific shopper is likely to purchase based on their order history (if available) as well as products they’ve viewed during their session on the site.
• Session recommendations are products that a specific shopper is likely to purchase based specifically on their most recently viewed products. The recommended products will be alternatives to the shopper’s most recently viewed products and will complement any products already in their cart.

If the shopper is brand new to the site, Personal and Session recommendations will fall back to Trending recommendations until there has been enough activity to generate personalized recommendations based on their behavior.

• Recently Viewed recommendations will show the most recent products viewed by the shopper.
• Trending recommendations are top-selling products across a rolling window of time. This recommendation type supports either site-wide trending or trending within a category or brand.

• Handpicked recommendations allow you to choose specific products to pin on criteria of your choice. Note that a handpicked profile will not show product placeholders in the preview; and pinned items must be in consecutive positions with no gaps. Handpicked profiles cannot be saved until at least one item is pinned.

  Note: Pinned items will be ignored if they also match an Excluded Products rule (for example, if they go out of stock).

• Custom recommendations are a fully curated product set using filters and boosts that you can manually configure depending on your specific use case. When you choose the "Custom" option, you will need to select between a static or dynamic custom profile.

Note: Custom recommendations are not based on shopper behavior and will not be personalized.

How many recommendations are returned?

All recommendation profiles will return up to 20 results by default. You can always lower this limit, either in the Preset tab or in the front-end request. Depending on the type of recommendation profile you create, and the template you select for that profile, you may also be able to increase this limit. For instance, site-wide trending profiles can return up to 80 recommendations, category and brand trending profiles can return up to 40 recommendations per category or brand in the request, and cart cross-sell profiles can return up to 20 recommendations per item in the cart.

Saving a profile

Once you have selected the placement and the recommendations type, click the "Create Profile" button at the bottom right. You will be taken to the Profile Editor to set up your new profile.

Click here to read more about Editing a Recommendations Profile.