You use your Oracle Recommendations account to configure campaigns, which are sets of business rules that control which recommendations are generated, based on site activity and other criteria. The account used by Commerce Reference Store is configured with two different campaigns, one for top-level category pages, and one for product detail pages. A container <div> element in the page HTML includes instructions for Oracle Recommendations that specify the number of products to recommend, the products to exclude from recommendations, the locations and layout of the recommendations, etc. See Inserting a Container <div> Element for more information.

Top-Level Category Page

On a top-level category page, up to four recommendations are displayed at the bottom of the page, under the Top Sellers label. The recommendations supplied are selected from the most popular products (defined as being in the top 10% of sales) within the current category and its descendant categories. The recommendations include only products on the current site.

The merchandiser-defined cross-sell products that appear under the Featured Items label on the page are explicitly excluded from the recommendations, so that no product appears in both areas. The list of the products to exclude is passed to Oracle Recommendations through the container <div> element.

Product Detail Page

On a product detail page, up to six recommendations are displayed below the We Also Suggest label on the right side of the page. These are a mix of recommendations generated by Oracle Recommendations and merchandiser-defined cross-sells. The cross-sells may include items on sites other than the current site.

The recommendations generated by Oracle Recommendations are restricted to products from a list of specified categories and their descendant categories. The list of these categories is determined by the RecommendationCategoriesForProduct servlet bean and is passed to Oracle Recommendations through the container <div> element. The categories include the current product’s category and its related categories (specified by its relatedCategories property).

Commerce Reference Store also passes to Oracle Recommendations a list of the merchandiser-defined cross-sells to include in the set of recommended products. The list contains the current product’s related products (specified by its relatedProducts property). This list is filtered by the ItemSiteGroupFilterDroplet to include only items from the current cart sharing site group.