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Personalization is a key term when trying to improve the online experience of your customers. The customer should feel that your organization knows and understands him. Providing your customer with product recommendations that are personalized to him is a key aspect in bringing personalization to action. But how can we manage to do that?

That is where Intelligent Selling Services (ISS) for SAP Commerce Cloud comes in. ISS is essentially a Merchandising tool designed to analyze the click behavior of your customers on the webshop and determine personalized product recommendations from these analyses.

Intelligent Selling Services

Introduction

From a business perspective the main goal of ISS is to provide personalization capabilities for the known and unknown visitor of your webshop(s) and by doing so improve the online customer experience and, consequently, increase the conversion.

ISS (formerly known as Context Driven Services) is a cloud-based Merchandising tool provided as an add-on for SAP Commerce Cloud. It is only available for the Professional or Enterprise licenses of SAP Commerce Cloud and it requires a separate tenant next to SAP Commerce Cloud itself.

With the standard, direct integration with SAP Commerce Cloud, ISS captures all relevant user events as behavioral data. It will analyze this captured data, discover the relevant patterns, add intelligence using machine learning and translate it to relevant merchandising and product recommendations options. These options can be presented as product carousels in the SAP Commerce Cloud webshop (a standard component is provided for the B2C webshops, both for the accelerator and the Spartacus version).

Types of Recommendations

ISS offers a web based administrative cockpit where your business users (e.g. product manager, category manager, merchandiser or marketeer) can define and review the product recommendations. As a starting point there are 4 types of recommendations to choose from:

Personalized Products

personalized products

The personalized product recommendations are based on each user’s personal click history. In other words, products that somehow match or are related to previous product selections of this user. And obviously, the business user can tune these recommendations by defining so-called influencers (e.g. top sellers, conversion rate) to meet your performance goals.

These personalized product recommendations can be shown just about anywhere on your webshop. For sure, they are relevant on your home page, but might also be targeted to boost specific recommendations on a landing, category or even a product detail page.

Related Products

related products

Related product recommendations are based on products related to the product that the customer is currently viewing. These recommendations should make sure that the customer keeps his focus by surfacing other relevant products on a product detail page. It is an interesting way of showing your product portfolio to the customers without having him to search for products or browse through the more traditional hierarchy of product categories.

ISS uses machine learning analysis of the click behavior of all your webshop visitors to find the most likely set of related products. A customer selecting one of these recommended products will certainly add to the score of this recommendation, increasing the probability that it will show up again as a recommendation for other visitors.

Trending Products

trending products

Trending product recommendations (also called Merchandising) are based on real-time product performances. It enables your customers to discover products on a home, category or landing page by showing the products that are trending based on a particular business metric (e.g. top sellers, top product views, highest conversion rate, etc.).

These business metrics are calculated by ISS, but the business user can fully determine which metrics should influence the trending product recommendations.

Recently Viewed Products

The recently viewed products recommendation simply displays up to 25 of the current user’s last viewed products making it easy for him navigate back and reconsider these recently viewed products.

Setup of a Product Recommendation

Creating a new product recommendation in the webshop is essentially a 3-step process in which a business user defines one or more product mixes, adds them to a strategy and assigns this strategy to a product carousel component in SAP Commerce Cloud.

1. Create a product mix

Defining the relevant product recommendations for your webshop can be done by the business user. From the administrative cockpit, one can setup a product mix using the Product Mix Builder.

A product mix defines the basics of a product recommendation. First step in the creation process is selecting the type of recommendation from the 4 available options presented in the previous paragraph.

product mix builder

Next step is adding influencers to the product mix to change the order of products that part of the recommendations. Several influencers are available in ISS and the business user can add the relevant influence with a rating factor to the product mix. For example, in the screenshot below the ‘add to cart’ influencer has a positive rating factor of 75, resulting in a higher position in the recommendation for products that have been added to the shopping cart by a lot of your webshop visitors.

influencer

The resulting list of recommended products can be previewed from the Product Mix Builder when the type of recommendations and the influencers have been set. From there, the business user can even decide to fix the position of his hero products by selecting the lock of the corresponding recommendations in the preview.

2 Add the product mix to a strategy

Using the same cockpit, the business user can open the Strategy Builder to create a new strategy. A strategy is essentially a combination of multiple product mixes sorted by priority. It gives the opportunity to combine or compare multiple sets of recommendations.

strategy

Comparing the product mixes can be done using the definition of a A/B test. The business user can select 2 product mixes from the strategy and choose to run an A/B test for a particular time period to determine the most successful product mix in terms of click-through rate (see also Reporting).

3 Assign the strategy to a product carousel

product carouselOnce the strategy is finished and activated, it becomes available for selection in the Product Carousel component in SmartEdit (the CMS editor of SAP Commerce Cloud). Like any other component, this ‘SAP Context-Driven Merchandising’ component can be positioned on the relevant pages. Using the editor for this component the name, title, background color and, most importantly, the strategy can be chosen to make sure that the product recommendations are shown in the webshop.

 

 

Reporting

ISS also includes reporting functionality from where the business user can observe how his carousels, product mixes and strategies are performing. The Merchandise Reporting can be opened from the cockpit and shows the click-through rates, impressions and coverage for a selected time period.

merchandise reporting

There is also specific reporting available for the A/B tests that have been running. It clearly visualizes the differences in performance between the 2 selected options within the test.

a/b test reporting

To conclude…

Intelligent Selling Services introduces some interesting merchandising options for your SAP Commerce Cloud webshop. If you have any questions or comments on how personalized product recommendations could improve your online customer experience, please feel free to contact us.

Mark Kilsdonk

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