Thinking Outside the Site – Digital Recommendations using a REST API

Body

Digital Recommendations is a powerful tool that helps your site increase revenue and conversion by utilizing existing Digital Analytics data along with cookie information to create relevant and personalized product and/or content recommendations for your customers. Many clients see 9%-20% of their total sales contribution from Recommendations and rely heavily of this tool to provide a personalized experience for their customers.

The majority of our clients use a JavaScript implementation on site, but did you know you can also use a REST API to implement recommendations offsite in mediums such as your call center, mobile application, or use it for any server side integration? The REST API allows developers to build applications that interact directly with the Digital Recommendations servers to retrieve recommendation data as JSON objects. Your application can then process the data as needed and display it appropriately. The request is quite simple and is outlined below:

http://recs.coremetrics.com/iorequest/restapi?cm_cid=[clientID]&cm_zoneid=[zoneID]&cm_targetid=[targetitemID]&cm_fallbackid=[fallbacktargetID]

Using the REST API has a few key advantages including:

• Use of recommendations without presence of IBM libraries
• Access to highly relevant wisdom of crowd recommendations leveraging IBM Digital Analytics data
• Fallback recommendations still available for use
• Available for both Product and Content Recommendation clients

The REST API is not a substitute for the JavaScript implementation and is not recommendationed for site use. If you currently own Recommendations, you already have the ability to use the REST API, no configuration changes need. Try it out using your own client ID and start thinking outside the site.

For more information please reference the Product Recommendation Configuration Guide here

Thanks,

Scarlett Hankey

Client Enablement Services Team