Recommendation Restrictions

The recommendation restrictions feature forces the recommendation strategies to not recommend or exclusively recommend certain products. You can define what products are affected by specifying individual product IDs, or product attributes such as category, brand, content, and price. You can recommend/not recommend products across the entire site, or conditionally in certain areas of the site. If you have multiple recommendation restrictions, they are applied additively. For example, if you have a rule that does not recommend products belonging to category X and another rule that doesn't recommend any product less than $10.00, then any product that is less than $10.00 or that belongs to category X is not shown to your customers.

These rules can be set up to restrict recommendations that are returned by the strategies engine, allowing retailers to tell Recommend to return only items within a certain category or subcategory, or to never show items below a certain price point, along with many other use cases.

The recommendation restrictions feature can cause Algonomy recommendations to ignore products that based on behavior do make sense to show or to not show any products to the shopper. For example, if you set up a rule that does not recommend all products that have a price greater than $0.01, no recommendations will appear. Therefore, it's important that you carefully review your rule, and if need be, test it out before enabling it for all your customer (see Step 4a under Manage rules)..

Recommendation restrictions apply on top of all other Merchandising Rules. 

Recommendation restrictions will only apply to Advanced Merchandising results if the "Enable system filters and rules" option is enabled in the Advanced Merchandising rule.

Attempting to add mass individual products directly to a rule will cause the dashboard to hang. The best way to avoid this is to assign those products with an attribute in the feed, or use another identifier common to those products to write the rule based on that context.

How It Works

Recommendation Restriction rules apply over the set of Recommendations returned by the rules and strategies defined, essentially filtering the recommendations according to the established rules. The restriction rules will only apply to those Advanced Merchandising rules that have the "Enable system filters and rules" option enabled. The restriction rules will also apply to backfill recommendations if Advanced Merchandising does not apply the minimum number of products required for a placement and "use backfill" is selected for that Advanced Merchandising rule.

Access Recommend Restrictions

To access the Recommendation Restrictions page, on the Omnichannel Personalization dashboard, go to Recommendations > Recommendation Restrictions. The Recommendation Restrictions page is displayed.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

The Recommendation Restrictions page displays all the existing rules with the following details:

  • Name: The rule name.

  • Type: Only Recommend/Do Not Recommend.

  • What: What is being evaluated .

  • Where: The page type on which the rule is used.

  • Start Date/End Date: The start and end dates for the rule (end date will be left blank if it is open ended).

  • Production & QA/Integration: Environment in which the rule is enabled.

  • Report: View report details.

Use Categories from Pending Purchase

What is the "Filter the seed product's category" checkbox and what does it do?

Select the Filter the seed product's category checkbox to filter categories to which the current seed product belongs. This is to prevent cannibalization or pulling a customer out of the funnel. If there are multiple seed products, the category to which each product belongs is filtered out. If a product belongs to multiple categories, and there is no "Primary Category" set, all categories are filtered. If a product does have a "Primary Category" set, that category is filtered out.

To learn more about Primary Categories, see Primary Category Control.

Best Practices

As a rule, it is best to only use restriction rules in certain scenarios:

  • When contractual agreement exists with a product supplier where you cannot recommend competing brands on their product pages.
    • "Do not recommend products from Brand X on an item page of a product from Brand Y."
  • When categories that are inappropriate to show with other categories on a site.
    • "Do not recommend "Adult" products when on all categories other than "Adult."
  • When enough purchase co-occurrence data is not available to show a cross-sell strategy, but you also don't want to show products that are similar to those already in cart that could cause cannibalization.
    • "Do not recommend pending purchase item categories when Recent Historical Items are shown on Cart page."

Instructions

For step-by-step instructions to create new rules, see Create New Recommendation Restriction Rules.