General Considerations for Explicit Recommendations
When determining how to implement explicit recommendations, consider these planning and development phase guidelines.
These guidelines include considerations for the following phases:
- Requirements phase
- Design phase
- Build phase
- Development and test phase
During the requirements phase, you idenfify how many types of recommendations are required for the solution. For each identified recommendation type, first determine requirements for the following:
- Presentation logic: Where each recommendation type renders,
how many recommendations are presented at a time. This determination includes what
occurs when:
- No recommendations are defined for a given category or product.
- Fewer than the planned number of recommendations are defined for a given category or product.
- More than the planned number of recommendations are defined for a given category or product.
- Visualization requirements: How individual recommendations appear and what data elements are required to support any specific visualization.
After making these determinations, identify how you want recommendations populated (import, manual, programmatic, or other). You can populate recommendations during development or when the site is live.
If you plan to manually create recommendations in Business Manager, make sure to identify the following:
- Who creates and maintains the recommendation.
- Any necessary review process.
- How to test the recommendation.
- How recommendation data is replicated with catalog data.
If you plan to import recommendations, define the import process. If possible, implement this process as a job within Salesforce B2C Commerce so that you can take advantage of the scheduling and notification functionality built into the system.
After you solidify information in the requirements phase, you can move on to the design phase. During this phase, consider the operational overhead and merchant ease of use.
| Consideration | Description |
|---|---|
| Operational overhead | Review the day-to-day operational overhead associated with creating
and maintaining recommendations manually within the system―especially if
you have large product catalogs. Determine whether you require that all
products appear with explicit recommendations; if you do, consider
whether it would be advantageous to add simple logic into the
presentation rules. If you plan to build logic into B2C Commerce to dynamically determine which products to recommend, pay attention to any additional page rendering overhead. Additional overhead can negatively impact storefront performance. Make sure to consider what you can populate as part of the import process using logic based on existing attributes and category assignments. |
| Merchant ease of use | Ensure that you know the product or category ID. This information
enables you to more accurately search within the Business Manager
Recommendations module. Note: For ease of use, ensure that these values
are meaningful to your organization.
|
Following the design phase, you enter the build phase where you build code to support recommendation requirements. You then facilitate the development and test phase:
- Create users with permissions that are in line with your business processes.
- Create an initial set of test recommendations.
- Use a test plan to ensure that all use cases are reviewed.
- Test the import process, if applicable.