Preparing and displaying recommendations

Using the personalisation option in an OXID eShop, you have products that are tailored to the customers, to their buying habits and their interaction with the online shop displayed at different points in the frontend. By default, Week’s Special and Top sellers on the start page, the category view, the product’s details page and the thank-you page at the end of the ordering process show products recommended for the customer.

Preparing recommendations

econda, an Internet service provider for personalisation and analytics, determines and analyses products that are recommended to the customer and then transfers them to the shop for display. These are based on the recommendation widgets and rules, which the shop owner configures together with the consultants from econda. In addition, econda needs a list of relevant products from the shop and the information obtained from econda Analytics. This allows the customer’s movement in the online shop to be analysed as a basis for the recommendations.

The export of product data and the integration of econda Analytics are described in Section Configuration.

Display of recommendations

The recommendations provided by econda are displayed in the shop using the so-called widgets, small units of the template system. By default, the econda recommendation widgets use the Embedded JavaScript (EJS) template engine to display four products. Of course, the presentation can be adapted to your own design. In addition, Visual CMS allows you to integrate the recommendation widgets in CMS pages, which is discussed in AI Content.

Some econda recommendation widgets are placed in the frontend where products are presented in the shop even without the OXID eShop personalisation option, for example, through promotions. To make sure that the same areas of the shop, such as Top sellers on the start page, are not displayed twice, the shop’s internal display must be deactivated. For details, please refer to the respective sections of the function description.