IBM Product Recommendations in the Madisons and Elite starter stores

IBM Product Recommendations, formerly known as Coremetrics Intelligent Offer is a solution that you can subscribe to that automatically generates personalized product recommendations on the storefront. The recommendations are based on the browsing, shopping, and purchasing behavior of individual customers. The Deprecated featureMadisons and Deprecated featureElite starter stores each contain five specialized e-Marketing Spots that support the display of dynamic recommendations that are generated by IBM Product Recommendations. You can publish an enhanced Madisons or Elite starter store to use store pages with these specialized e-Marketing Spots.

To display dynamic recommendations in one of the e-Marketing Spots, you must create a web activity in the Management Center Marketing tool. The web activity must use the Display IBM Product Recommendations action, specifying the zone ID of the offer you want to display. When you publish a starter store, there are no prebuilt web activities that are running in these specialized e-Marketing Spots; however, you can create a web activity yourself using the Zone IDs set up in IBM Product Recommendations. Here is an example:

Web activity that displays a dynamic recommendation

Here is an example of an e-Marketing Spot displaying dynamic recommendations:
Intelligent Offer example

Flat file recommendations for IBM Product Recommendations are supported by the existing e-Marketing Spot snippets that are used in starter stores (ContentAreaESpot.jsp, ESpotNavDisplay.jsp, ScrollingProductESpot.jsp). If you use flat file recommendations, you do not need to use the specialized e-Marketing Spots that are described here.

JSP snippets to support IBM Product Recommendations dynamic recommendations

When you publish the enhanced Deprecated featureMadisons or Deprecated featureElite starter store, the e-Marketing Spot JSP snippets for dynamic recommendations are stored in the following location:

WC_eardir/Stores.war/Madisons/Snippets/Marketing/ESpot
WCDE_installdir/workspace/Stores/WebContent/Madisons/Snippets/Marketing/ESpot

WC_eardir/Stores.war/Elite/Snippets/Marketing/ESpot
WCDE_installdir/workspace/Stores/WebContent/Elite/Snippets/Marketing/ESpot

The JSP snippets are:


File	Description
IntelligentOfferESpot.jsp	An e-Marketing Spot snippet that has an added function to include a refresh area that can display dynamic recommendations from IBM Product Recommendations. You can also use this snippet to display WebSphere Commerce recommendations for catalog entries, categories, and content because the snippet is based on the ContentAreaESpot.jsp e-Marketing Spot JSP snippet that is used for other starter store e-Marketing Spots.
IntelligentOfferDisplayPartnumbers.jsp	This JSP file is associated with the e-Marketing Spot refresh area. The JSP file sets up a scrollable widget to display dynamic recommendations for catalog entries.
IntelligentOfferDisplayPartnumber.jsp	This JSP file finds the catalog entry ID associated with a part number and uses CatalogEntryThumbnailDisplay.jsp to display the catalog entry. JSP caching can be used for this JSP file to improve runtime performance.

The e-Marketing Spot also uses a JavaScript file that is stored in the following location:

WC_eardir/Stores.war/Madisons/javascript
WCDE_installdir/workspace/Stores/WebContent/Madisons/javascript

WC_eardir/Stores.war/Elite/javascript
WCDE_installdir/workspace/Stores/WebContent/Elite/javascript

The JavaScript file is:


File	Description
IntelligentOffer.js	This file provides methods to manage the refresh area that is used to display IBM Product Recommendations dynamic recommendations. This file also contains the zone population function `io_rec_zp`. This function is called by IBM Product Recommendations when it has a list of part numbers to display in an e-Marketing Spot. The refresh area is then called with the list of part numbers. The JSP associated with the refresh area loads the necessary information to display each catalog entry. If you have configured IBM Product Recommendations to return all the required information to display a catalog entry, then modify this function to remove the call to the refresh area, and create and display the appropriate HTML based on the information that IBM Product Recommendations provides. The zone population function is also set up to display the Zone Header Text defined in the IBM Product Recommendations Recommendation Plan. This text is displayed at the top of the e-Marketing Spot, for example, "Other Customers Also Bought." Alternatively, you can specify text using the espotTitle parameter when including the IBM Product Recommendations e-Marketing Spot snippet.