Product catalog

This section includes technical descriptions of features related to managing and presenting the product catalog, including browsing, searching, and displaying product details.

Merchandizing and Product Associations

Merchandizing is the practice of displaying related products as the customer browses a product page. For example, a customer browsing a Canon digital camera could be recommended a Sony digital camera.

Merchandizing works by associating the "source" product on display with "target" products the customer may be interested in. If the target product has multiple SKUs, the association can target a specific SKU.

In the code, a product has no direct knowledge of its associated products; ProductAssociation objects maintain an association between "source" and "target" products. To retrieve a product’s ProductAssociations, use the ProductAssociationService.

Key classes and files

The key classes and files in core are:

• ProductAssociation - A representation of the link between a source and target product
• ProductAssociationService - A service for performing persistence operations on ProductAssociations

The key classes and files in store assets are:

• VM_global_library.vm - A Velocity macro library that contains methods for displaying product associations
• productMacros.vm - A Velocity template for displaying products

ProductAssociation Properties

ProductAssociation objects have the following properties:

• associationType

  Type: int

  The type of merchandising association between the two products. See ProductAssociation Types for more information.

• sourceProduct

  Type: Product

  The product on display in the store.

• targetProduct

  Type: Product

  The related product.

• catalog

  Type: Catalog

  The catalog the ProductAssociation applies to.

• startDate

  Type: Date

  The date the association starts to be applied.

• endDate

  Type: Date

  The date the association is removed.

• defaultQuantity

  Type: int

  The quantity of the target accessory added to the cart when the customer purchases the target accessory.

• sourceProductDependent

  Type: boolean

  The indicator for whether the target product is a child of the source product. If true, the child can’t exist in the cart without the parent.

• ordering

  Type: int

  The order the target product appears on the source product page relative to other target products.

• uidPk

  Type: long

  The association’s UID generated by OpenJPA

ProductAssociation Types

By default, there are six types of product associations. Depending on the association type, productMacros.vm displays the target product in different locations.

• Cross Sell

  Promotes alternative products that are similar to the source product. Displayed in a "You May Also Like" section.

• Up Sell

  Promotes more expensive versions of the source product. Displayed in an "Upgrade To" section.

• Warranty

  Promotes "add-on" products. Usually dependent on the source product. Purchasable on the source product page.

• Accessory

  Promotes products that complement the source product. Purchasable on the source product page.

• Replacement

  Promotes alternative products when the source product is out of stock or discontinued. Displayed in a "Replaced By" section.

• Product Recommendation

  Promotes products that were also purchased by customers who purchase the source product. Displayed below the Product Details section

note

Store administrators can create five association types using the Commerce Manager. Product recommendations are automatically generated by Elastic Path.

Product Recommendation

Product Recommendation is a type of product association that promotes products based on what other customers are buying. For a "source" product on display, Product Recommendation targets products that were bought by customers who buy the source product. For example, Customer A bought a Canon camera and a Kingston SD card. When Customer B enters the Canon Camera’s product page, Product Recommendation recommends Customer B to also buy a Kingston SD card.

Product Recommendations are computed by the ProductRecommendationService Quartz job in the Commerce Manager.

Key classes and files

• ProductAssociation - A representation of the link between a source and target product
• ProductRecommendationService - A service for computing product recommendations
• RecommendationSet - A set of product recommendations computed by the ProductRecommendationService
• productMacros.vm - A Velocity template for displaying products

Product Recommendation Calculation

ProductRecommendationService uses the algorithm in updateRecommendations() to compute product recommendations:

1. Retrieve purchase data from the database as (CustomerId, ProductId) tuples, where the customer CustomerID bought the product ProductID.
2. Convert the purchase data into a map where the customerId is the key and the list of products purchased is the value.
3. Create a map of product recommendations by mapping each source product to other products they were purchased with.

   • This map maps product ids to RecommendationSet instances

     RecommendationSet counts the number of times other products were purchased with the source product and sorts the results in decreasing order. RecommendationSet returns the top N most frequent products as recommendations

4. For each source product with recommendations: A. Load the source product and its ProductAssociations. B. Remove any product recommendation type ProductAssociations that are not in the new product recommendations set. C. Add any new product recommendations as new product recommendation type ProductAssociations.

Configuring Product Recommendation

The Product Recommendation calculation schedule is configurable via the Commerce Manager’s quartz configuration file.

• To configure the max number of days of order history to use in Product Recommendation computation, change the COMMERCE/STORE/PRODUCTRECOMMENDATIONS/numberOrderHistoryDays system setting

• To configure the max number of most frequent products to use as recommendations, change the COMMERCE/STORE/PRODUCTRECOMMENDATIONS/numberMaxRecommendations system setting

• To disable product recommendation, you can assign a -1 to either of the above system settings

note

Disabling product recommendation will not remove existing product recommendations.