Enable product recommendations

  • 15 minutes

Retailers can turn on recommendations at the click of a button. This topic explains how you can enable product recommendations and tailor lists for Commerce customers.

Note

Enabling recommendations will also enable personalized recommendations. Retailers can’t enable personalization without first enabling the base recommendations service.

Recommendations pre-check

Before enabling recommendations, note that product recommendations are only supported for Commerce customers who have migrated their storage to using Azure Data Lake storage, and the functionality is not available for on-premises customers.

Before enabling recommendations, make sure that you perform the following configurations on the network:

  1. Ensure that Azure Data Lake storage has been purchased and successfully verified in the environment.
  2. Ensure that the entity store RetailSales measurement has been enabled and set to auto-refresh.
  3. Confirm that Microsoft Entra ID identity configuration contains an entry for Recommendations.

Microsoft Entra ID identity configuration

Ensuring that Microsoft Entra ID identity is configured to contain an entry for recommendations is a required step for all customers who are running an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) configuration and who have set up their own environment on the Azure platform. For customers who are running on preconfigured Windows machines or Windows virtual machines with Azure Service Fabric, this step should be automatic, and we recommend verifying that the setting is configured as expected.

To check the Microsoft Entra ID identity setup, follow these steps:

  1. In Commerce, search for the Microsoft Entra ID applications page.

  2. Verify if an entry exists for RecommendationSystemApplication-1.

    If the entry does not exist, add a new entry with the following information:

    • Client ID - d37b07e8-dd1c-4514-835d-8b918e6f9727
    • Name - RecommendationSystemApplication-1
    • User ID - RetailServiceAccount

  3. Save and close the page.

To turn on product recommendations, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Retail and Commerce > Product recommendations > Recommendation parameters.
  2. In the Common shared parameters page, select Product recommendations.
  3. Set the Enable recommendations option to Yes.

The following screenshot shows how to enable recommendations in Commerce.

Screenshot of the Commerce shared parameters page.

For the 10.0.12 update, merchandisers can enable recommendations from the Feature management page and perform recommendations-related tasks from the Configure recommendations page.

Screenshot of the Configure recommendations page.

The procedure of enabling recommendations starts with the process of generating product recommendation lists. It might take several hours before the lists are available and can be viewed at the Store Commerce or in Commerce.

After you have enabled product recommendations, the default settings will take effect with auto-filled values; these market parameters are configurable for retailers to best reflect the flow of business. We recommend that you spend time evaluating whether the results fit the selling motion of products.

Currently, two types of market parameters are configurable by retailers:

  • Age of product (in days) - Products that have been added within the specified number of days before the current date can be used to select product candidates. The default value in the screenshot above suggests that products as old as 180 days can be used in the Trending product list.
  • Consider sales history (in days) - Sales transactions that have occurred within the specified number of days before the current date can be used to order the products. The default value that is shown above this parameter suggests that all purchases of a product in the last 36 days would be used to determine the placement of the product in the Trending product list.

After enabling recommendations in Commerce, you need to add the recommendations panel to the control Store Commerce screen by using the layout tool before recommendations can start appearing on the checkout screen.

Enable omnichannel personalized product recommendations

Watch the following video to learn how to enable omnichannel personalized recommendations.