Resources Merchandising Actions
Merchandise Recommendations
Merchandise Recommendations
With Recommend Rules, you can optimize your recommendations towards your business goals by tweaking recommendations generated by the machine learning models and shape your user experience dynamically.
Example use cases for Recommend Rules include:
- Ensure you only show related products from the same category as the viewed product.
- Ensure you don’t show recommendations for out-of-stock products.
- Recommend a newly launched product first by pinning it to the first position.
- For all products from a specific category, pin items to the top of the recommendations. For example, for all “hair” products, recommend all “shampoo” products first.
NOTE: You can apply up to 10,000 rules per recommendation scenario.
Rules have conditions and consequences. When the condition (if) is met, the consequence (then) is applied to the recommendation scenario.
- If you want to boost, bury, or filter items by a filter attribute, make sure you include this attribute in the attributes for faceting.
- Go to the Recommend Rules section of the Algolia dashboard and select the model to which you want to apply Rules. In this example, we have selected the Related Products model.
- Click Add new Rule and specify the Conditions when the Rule applies.

- Recommend supports these conditions:
- Any item is a source item. The rule applies to all recommendations.
- Specific item is viewed. The rule applies when a specific item (identified by its
objectID
) is viewed. - Subset of source items. The rule applies to items that match a filter.
- Specify the Consequences to determine what actions are applied to the recommendations when the conditions are met.

- Recommend supports these consequences:
- Pin items. The rule places a recommendation at a specific position.
- Hide items. The rule excludes items from the recommendation.
- Boost items. The rule places items higher up within recommendations.
- Bury items. The rule places items lower down within recommendations
- Filter items. The rule only shows recommendations that match the specified filter criteria.
- When you select Filter items as a consequence, select same as viewed items to let the filter criteria match the same value as the viewed item:

- Optional: enter a label for a Context defined in your app

- Contexts act as additional constraints for rules. Common use cases for Rules contexts are distinguishing users by device type, language preference, or country. For an example of defining a context, see Identifying your user’s device.
- For example, if you only want to show book recommendations of the same genre as the viewed item, set “Genre” > “sameAsViewedItem”.
- You can then preview the results. Once satisfied, save the Rule.

- Optional: add a description for you and your team.
