This feature lets you use in-store receipts collected in Customer Engagement to influence product recommendations in Product Discovery. It helps you create more relevant recommendations by taking offline buying behavior into account, instead of relying only on online data. By including in-store purchases, you get a more complete view of customer preferences across channels. The feature is controlled in Customer Engagement and does not require configuration in Product Discovery.
Prerequisites
To use in-store purchases in Product Discovery recommendations, the following prerequisites must be met:
- You are tracking in-store receipts in Customer Engagement
- You are using Customer Engagement API v2 or API v3, or file-based import with SKU
- Customer Engagement is connected to Product Discovery
- The SKU in Customer Engagement must match the variantKey used in Product Discovery
Setting it up
The feature is toggled in Customer Engagement, reach out to your account manager if you want this enabled. Once enabled, Product Discovery will automatically start using in-store receipts according to the rules described below. If you are unsure whether the feature is enabled, or whether your SKU and variantKey values are aligned, contact your Customer Success Manager or Support.
There is no setup required in Product Discovery.
How it works
When the feature is enabled, in-store purchases from Customer Engagement are evaluated and used in Product Discovery recommendations in two different ways.
Personalization
First, offline purchases are added as a data source for personalization. In-store purchases are used as a base for:
- PERSONAL recommendations
- Email recommendations using CUSTOMER_BASED logic
This means that products bought in store can influence personalized recommendations and customer-based email content, even if the customer has not purchased those products online.
Exclude in-store purchased products
Second, in-store purchases are excluded from certain recommendation types when they were made by the same customer. This prevents recently purchased products from being recommended again and helps keep recommendations relevant.
In-store purchases made by the same customer are excluded from the following recommendations:
- Add to cart recs
- Cart recs
- Favorites recs
- Personal recs
- Customer based (Product Discovery email recs)
- Top seller (Product Discovery email recs)
- Favorite based (Product Discovery email recs)
- Product based (Product Discovery email recs)
- Top products (Connected recs)
- Contextual/complementary (Connected recs)
Purchase data is based on Customer Engagement receipts. For purchases to be correctly applied, the SKU in Customer Engagement must match the variantKey in Product Discovery.
Does not affect ranking
In-store purchases do not affect or skew the ranking (entity score) in Product Discovery. Product ranking is still based solely on online behavior and online purchases. Offline purchases are only used for personalization and exclusion logic, as described above.