Overview of Interact integration with Digital Recommendations
This section describes how IBM® Interact can integrate with IBM® Digital Recommendations to provide Interact-driven product recommendations, including a description of the process, and the mechanisms by which the integration takes place.
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:
1.
The page logic identifies the Customer ID of the visitor.
2.
An API call to Interact is made, passing in the required information to generate an offer for that customer.
3.
The returned offer provides the web page with at least three attributes: the URL for the offer image, the URL of the landing page when the customer clicks through, and the category ID to use for determining which products to recommend.
4.
The category ID is then used to call Digital Recommendations to retrieve the recommended products. This set of products is in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format in order by top-selling products in that category.
5.
The offer and products are then displayed in the visitor's browser.
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.
Integration Prerequisites
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