How to set product recommendations with the API?

slf92637
Tourist
4 0 1

I run a shop that sells 20.000+ thousands of unique products (think antiques).

We recently migrated to a 2.0 theme and are now looking to use the Search & Discovery's new recommendation system for products. Sadly it seems like the automated recommendations generated by Shopify are very lackluster. They just don't make much sense.

 

Thing is, we have an ERP-System that contains all the data needed to tell Shopify "Recommend these ten products for people that look at this product"... but I can't seem to find an API or some bulk editing tool to do that. The user interface provided by Search and Discovery expects me to manually specify all the recommended products, which is just not possible for the size of our inventory.

Replies 5 (5)
ricardoceci
Shopify Expert
14 0 3

Hi:

 

Are you open to use 3rd party tools, like Amazon Personalize?. Do you have any specific criteria for recommending products? Or are you just leveraging in similarity?

 

Thanks,

Ricardo | Founder @ VN Studios
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slf92637
Tourist
4 0 1

I am asking for a way to tell Shopify over API which products to recommend. I would still need that way if I were to use a 3rd party tool like Amazon Personalize.

 

That being said, the recommendation that I want would be based on Shopify tags. e.g. When the customer looks at 18th century furniture, just recommend other products that are tagged with '18th century' and 'furniture'.

DeyanTodorov
Shopify Partner
2 0 1

Hey, I'm in same situation. Do u find a solution for that?

slf92637
Tourist
4 0 1

Hey,

 

I have an idea that might work, but I have not gotten around to trying it myself yet.

Apparently the Product Recommendations are controlled by a product metafield definition called product_recommendation.related_products

 

While there seems to be no direct API to set product recommendations, there is an API to assign metafield values. My plan is to try and fill a product's metafield product_recommendation.related_products with ids for the products I want recommended.

 

Like I said though, this is just a plan right now, I can not verify that it works. If you get around to trying it sooner than me, I'd appreciate it if you let me know your results.

slf92637
Tourist
4 0 1

Heya, I can now verify that this works. You need to fill the metafields from search & discovery through the metafields api.