New in Kentico 8: Strands recommender integration

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With the upcoming release of Kentico 8, you will be able to provide your website visitors Amazon-like product recommendations in real time. With Strands recommendations, you can individually recommend products to your shoppers using "People who bought this also bought", "Best sellers this week" and other widgets. We bring you built-in integration with Strands recommender.
Strands recommender within Kentico enables you to provide tailored product recommendations to each of your potential buyers. It learns the behavior and tastes of every single visitor — from activities like page visits and adding a product to the shopping cart — compares these to other visitors, and serves product recommendations  most likely to match the buyer’s preferences. You can use many predefined recommendation templates such as "Most popular products", "Still in your shopping cart", "People who viewed this also viewed", or create custom ones. Also, you can recommend products across channels - both on web pages and in emails.


("Most popular products" recommendations on a web page)


Web page recommendations are served in real time and have almost zero impact on the speed of your website as they are loaded through JS asynchronous code. This means that you can recommend products to your visitors without any negative effects to your website. Email recommendations are loaded as late as possible — once the recipient opens the email — so that the recommendations served in the email reflect all their latest interests. What’s more,  Strands recommender integration handles multiple languages and currencies,  so you can serve your worldwide market with ease.


("Still in your shopping cart" recommendations in email)
 
You can also customize the look of the recommendations to exactly match your needs by either using Strands' easy-to-use interface or by utilizing powerful transformations within Kentico.


(Creating custom transformation for product recommendations)


My personal list of favorite things about Strands recommender contains:
  • Strands has offices both in USA and in Europe. So if you are going to use their great support you can keep it local.
  • Solution is very scalable and robust. Strands has experience with variety of small, medium and large ecommerce web sites.
  • Pricing is affordable.
  • You can easily evaluate how different recommendation templates are performing using Kentico A/B testing

Please note, that in order to fully use potential of Strands recommender integration it is recommended to have at least 400 products in store and 10,000 visitors trafic per month.
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Vita Janecek

I'm Online Marketing Product Owner and I'm writing mainly about Kentico features such as Contact management, Marketing automation, E-mail marketing, A/B testing, etc.

Comments

Vita Janecek commented on

Hi John,

while Strands recommender is content-agnostic (that means it can recommend any type of content), current integration in Kentico supports just products. We were creating this integration with future enhancements in mind so if this will be commonly requested feature we will improve it. I suggest you to go to ideas.kentico.com and submit your idea there to see how much traction it will receive.

Cheers, Vita

John commented on

Hi, can the strands recommender work with documents too? i.e. cross sell content based on a user's interest in the site's different areas. eg. if a visitor goes to the hotel room pages, we want to be able to show him some restaurants pages at the bottom of the page.