How to Integrate Recommendation Engine with Magento

Did you know that Magento provides services to nearly 250,000 e-commerce stores on the Internet? In fact, according to the Hosting Tribunal, 12 percent of all online stores come from Magento. So, if your website is on Magento, you already have a good start ahead of your competitors. Now all you need is a product recommendation engine that has the ability to understand your market and what the users usually need. Magento has a product recommendation engine, but it has its own challenges , such as high prices and non-compatibility with grouped products. In such scenarios, going with a third-party recommendation engine is the best solution. 

In this blog, we are going to explore more about how you can integrate Alie – an AI-based recommendation engine with the Magento platform for Magento Development Services.

Alie provides real-time recommendations to your users by making use of advanced algorithms that are scalable, and more importantly, easy to integrate. All you need to do is follow these simple steps:

How to integrate Alie AI Recommendation Engine with Magento?

1. Sign up with Alie

It is easy, just click here and sign up with your business email-id. Once you do this, you will get the option of 14-days free trial, after which you will have to buy the subscription based on what is best suited for your platform.

2. Create a Project on Alie CMS

The steps are quite simple to be performed by anybody. All you have to do is create a project by logging in to Alie. The benefit of using Alie is that you can create multiple projects if you wish to; this helps in comparing the different algorithms used and in deciding which algorithm works best for your website. 

3. Add data

There are several factors that come into play when you are adding data to your project. The first and foremost is that if you only wish to see how Alie operates, then you can simply choose from the data available in Alie; the sample data covers the three prominent industries – E-commerce, Food, and Media & Entertainment.

Now, if you want to try Alie with your website’s data, then there are two methods through which you can add data.

Adding Data Manually

For this, one only needs to follow two steps, but remember in mind you will have to repeat these two steps for User, Content, and Behavioral data from your website.

1. Click on ‘Add data’
2. Add ‘Import User Data’, and add the file from your website. Repeat this by clicking on ‘Import Content Data’ and ‘Import Behavioral Data’.

Adding Data Automatically

For this, the steps are a little complicated, but once you are done with it the data will be automatically extracted from the website. You won’t have to add the data again and again.

API Integration

1. Click on ‘Add data’
2. Go to ‘Configuration’
3. Click on ‘General Information’ and type your domain name
4. Once you have added your domain name, you can see your data set and your universal ID for API integration. Important to keep in mind is that this universal ID will be different for each project you make under ALIE. To learn more about how you can add the data through API click here. 

JavaScript Integration

1. Click on ‘Add data’
2. Go to ‘JavaScript Code’
3. Copy the entire code by clicking on ‘copy’
4. Paste the above code into the head of HTML file (Look the below video for reference)
5. Your data can now be automatically imported from your website. To learn more about how to add different parameters of importing data through JavaScript Integration, click here.

4.  Configure the data according to your requirements

Once the data is imported from your website, you now need to configure the data fields and train Alie.

1. Go to ‘Project’
2. Click on ‘User data’ and add field to ‘User ID’ and ‘User Name’
3. Click on ‘Item data’ and add field to ‘Unique ID’ and ‘Item Name’
4. You also have the option of adding data types, but it is not mandatory as Alie itself detects the data types. You will get options such as ‘String’, ‘Float’ and ‘Integer’.
5. For ‘Behavioral data’, you do not need to do anything as Alie is already trained. 
6. Click on ‘Proceed’.

5. Select your preferred algorithms

There are different algorithms available in Alie for you to choose from. List of algorithms – 

1. Other Users Choice
2. Most Viewed
3. End-User Interaction
4. Cookie Based Recommendation
5. Most – Purchased
6. Customizable Recommendation

6. See the output in tabular grid or download it in JSON format. 

You can see which product is being recommended to which user through the following steps – 

1. Select the ‘User ID’ or ‘Name’ from the available options in drop down
2. Click on ‘View Output’
3. See the output in JSON on the right side of the screen
4. To see the output in tabular grid structure click on ‘Preview’

With Alie, you won’t have to wait for months in order to integrate it with your website. Interestingly, if you have any particular requirements for a recommendation engine, Alie’s team will make sure you get it within a reasonable amount of time. More importantly, Alie can be integrated with any website, doesn’t matter if the website is made on any hosted platform or through any programming language such as Php, Java or Python. 

Conclusion

As a merchant, you must be aware of the fact that it wasn’t any fairy who granted Netflix and Amazon success overnight, but it was their recommendation engine. So our ‘recommendation’ to you would be to integrate a recommendation engine with your platform sooner than later. Start with exploring Alie – our AI-based recommendation engine with round the clock  support backed by experts and dev team that can address all your woes. Try the 14-day free trial first to explore and see for yourself why recommendations are necessary and why Alie is the best choice for you.