What is a Magento product recommendation engine and how does it work?

Magento product recommendation engine is a tool that automatically recommends relevant products to a user to encourage buying.

The product recommendation engine collects and uses clients’ search data to define a list of products that are often bought together.

Magento product recommendations tool takes into account the habits of the buyer as a whole and provides displaying banners, offers related items, upsells, and cross-sells that contribute to average cheque growth.

This is a win-win solution for both parties. You, as a seller, get more clicks on products and get more orders. And the buyer no longer needs to spend additional time searching for a suitable product.

The Automatic Related Products extension can be used to implement such a feature with an extended functions list. You can do it in 2 ways: by implementing the Recommended Products block or by offering bundles.

Here you will see how to create a bundle pack with the help of the extension:

Step 1. Navigate to Catalog > Bundle Packs and click Add New Pack button.

Step 2. Then fill in the following sections:

• Set Status to Yes to activate the bundle pack.
• Choose the period when the bundle will be active in the Enable From section.
• The next section is to define the Bundle Pack Name for internal use.
• In the Store section, you need to define the needed store views to show the bundle.
• Choose Customer Groups the bundle pack will be shown for.
• Define the Title to be displayed on the frontend.
• Define the Discount Type and Discount Amount for a pack.
• To apply the discount to the key item in a pack, you need to enable the Apply Discount to the Main Product option. 
• Come up with the Upsell Message to be displayed in a shopping cart. It will appear if this function is enabled in the configuration.
• Define the main and bundle pack products on the Bundle Pack Products and Main Products grids.

For more information on settings, see the user guide. 

If you want to see the algorithm of creating product recommendation rule, check out the video guide:

What is the Magento recommendation engine?

Magento product recommendation engine is a tool that automatically recommends a list of relevant products to the user to encourage them to buy more. Product recommendation engines allow in-store shoppers to receive a set of related products in addition to the products they were interested in.

What’s the difference between the Magento Recommended Products extension and AI-based platforms for products recommendation?

Simply put, they cover the same marketing task — upselling and cross-selling products to increase average order conversion. Surely, in some way, we can say that AI-based solutions are more data-centered, and therefore, more precise in the choice of products. However, the platforms need to be integrated with your Magento, educated, and, which is more important, all this takes much more money and human resources than installing a ready-made extension for Magento. Magento Recommended Products covers the same business needs and automates the process to save you time and money.