IBM® Interact integrates with
IBM® Digital Recommendations via a Representational state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API), made available from the
Digital Recommendations installation. By making the REST API calls with the appropriate category ID,
Interact can retrieve recommended products and include them in the offer information displayed on the customized page that the visitor is viewing.
When a visitor views the URL of the web page (such as the sample JSP page included with your Interact installation), the page calls
Interact to fetch an offer. Assuming the offer has been configured within
Interact with the correct parameters, the following steps occur, in the simplest case:
This integration is useful for combining offer recommendation and product recommendations together. For example, on one web page you might have two interaction points: one for an offer, and one for recommendations matching that offer. To accomplish this, the web page makes a call to Interact to make a real-time segmentation to determine best offer (say, for 10% off all small appliances). When the page receives the offer from
Interact, that offer would contain the category ID (in this example, for small appliances). The page would then pass the category ID for small appliances to
Digital Recommendations using an API call, and receive in response the best product recommendations for that category based on popularity.
A simpler example might be where a web page makes a call to Interact from only to find out a category (say, high-end cutlery) that matches the customer profile. It would then pass the received category ID to
Digital Recommendations, and get cutlery product recommendations.