Create Your First Product Carousel with Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Com...

Abstract (The blog post is not completed yet and only used as a place holder, will be done very shortly though)

As you know, Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud provides real-time personalization through data driven merchandising product carousels as well as machine learning based product recommendations. Meanwhile, It also supports a reporting and management tool to monitor and improve personalization performance. (cf. a brief introduction here)

In this blog post, I am going to walk you through the essentials steps for creating your first product carousel based on Intelligent Selling Services and SAP Commerce Cloud. I’ll also briefly show how to test and monitor the personalization performance of the product carousel within Intelligent Selling Services.

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started!

Prerequisite

you should have:

1. a provisioned Intelligent Selling Services tenant with admin role access.
2. a SAP Commerce Cloud running instant with a storefront.
3. successfully configured connection between the 2 systems above. (If you haven’t performed the connection configuration yet, in this blog post there is a step-by-step description of the process)

We will walk through the process by:

1. conduct the setup in the Intelligent Selling Services tenant
2. conduct the setup in the SAP Commerce Cloud instance via SmartEdit
3. test the configuration on the web page of SAP Commerce Cloud
4. monitor the performance of the configuration in Intelligent Selling Services.

Setup in Intelligent Selling Services

Please log into your Intelligent Selling Services tenant and make sure the site (top right) that is connected to your SAP Commerce Cloud instance is selected:

Select The Site

Now Navigate to Merchandising | Product Mixes, here you will see all the product mixes which are created in the selected site. As we are going to create a new one, please click on the “Create Product Mix” button.

Ready to Create A New Product Mix

In the product mix creation workspace, the first thing you should notice is the setting:

Setting of Product Mix

Under “Type”, you can select which type of product mix you want to create next:

• Trending Products: recommends products based on various influencers that can be configured. (we will get into the “Influencers” tab later)
• Related Products: is usually used on the product detail page and recommends products related to the current product based on what all the customers have viewed before. Specifically, machine learning is used here to analyze the behaviors of all the customers.
• Personalized Products: can be used anywhere and recommends products based on the current user’s click history. Specifically, the behaviors of the current user are being analyzed.
• Recently Viewed: recommends up to 25 last products in user’s viewed history.

Depending on which type of product mix you select, you can control the “Category sensitivity” to restrict the product recommendation to

• a “current category” (where product recommendations will change according to which category is currently being viewed, e.g. in a category page) or a “fixed category” (predefined to set to a certain category only), in the case of Trending Products, or
• “all categories” (i.e. not category related) or “current category” (depending on which category page is being viewed) in the cases of Related Products or Personalized Product.

As an example, we are going to create a product recommendation to display the products that are most frequently added into shopping carts. While choosing the “Trending Products” and keeping the “Category sensitivity” as “current category”, please fill the Name and Description fields accordingly.

Creating a Trending Product Carousel

Please note, if you choose any machine learning based product mixes (such as “Related Products” or “Personalized Products”), you’ll need to wait for some time until the machine learning based analysis is activated:

Machine Learning based Product Mixes

Now you can click on the Influencers tab and then the “Add Influencer” button

Add an Influencer

Please note, if you hover over the question mark to the right of the “Add influencer” button, you can see a very detailed description about the functionalities of each influencers listed.

As an example, please choose “Add to Cart rate”. Now you will see the influencer being added, while a preview of the product recommendation is being displayed on the right hand side. You should also set the weight of the influencer, either by typing the value directly in the field or drag the glider ball to the desired value directly.

Configuring Influencer(s) with Preview

Please note:

• 0 means the influencer has no effect for the product recommendation and negative value makes the products less important if they get inserted carts more frequently.
• weights of influencers are essential with the cases of multiple influencers. (which you can also add if you like)
• Every time you change a weight value, the preview product recommendation will also change accordingly, showing the possibility to test right away whether the recommended products match your expectation or not.

Now switch to the last tab of “Catalog”,

Preview Products and Fix Products

Here you have 2 possibilities to work with:

1. choose a certain category via the dropbox to see (in the left panel) how products are recommended with the added influencers in the previous tab
2. drag any product from the left panel and drop it to the right panel, if you want to always promote certain products in the product recommendation.

In our example, you can choose any category (such as “Sony”), observe the product recommendation changed, then drag the DSC-T90 pink camera (or any other product) to the right panel.

Now we are done with creating a new product mix, don’t forget to click the save button to keep the configuration.

Save The Newly Created Product Mix

As the next step, please navigate to Merchandising | Strategies. Here you can see all the available strategies of the selected site. You can also create a new Strategy by clicking on the “Create Strategy” button.

Strategy Listing and Create a New Strategy

Every strategy:

• is the key to connect to a product carousel CMS component in the web pages of SAP Commerce Cloud. (We will detail this later)
• can relate to one or more product mixes, allowing product recommendation based on contexts of the more prioritised product mix.
• can be used for A/B testing to define the distribution of related product mixes.

In the Strategy Creation Workspace, please fill the name and description fields, and click the “Add Product Mix” button.

Strategy Creation Workspace

Please note, when you click on the “Add Product Mix” button, the strategy is already automatically saved and you don’t have to hit the “Save” button any more.

In the “Add Product Mix” pop up window, make sure you select the previous product mix, and hit the save button:

Choose and Add the Product Mix

Please note:

• you don’t select any category here, because in our simple example we don’t want the product recommendation to be limited to any category.
• you don’t choose a start/stop date, making the product mix activated all the time.

Now the setup in the Intelligent Selling Services tenant is done, let’s take a look at how to setup in the SAP Commerce Cloud instance next.

Setup in SAP Commerce Cloud

to be written

Testing

to be written

Monitoring

to be written

Summary

The blog post introduces how to

• create a product merchandising carousel with Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud, and
• test and monitor the performance of the product carousel with the tooling of Intelligent Selling Services.

If you want to know more?

Please take a look at the portal page of Intelligent Selling Services:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/product/INTELLIGENT_SELLING_SERVICES/ 

Also pay attention to the up-coming blog post (e.g to follow me on SAP Community) and planned live session on SAP Learning Hub about Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud.

That’s it and thanks for reading