This week we have dedicated most of our time on working with GMap (for a special project related to store/voucher locator), YII (the php framework system) and the cross promotion module. We have install the module on the first site (http://www.thegemtree.com/), the installed version takes the products’ names and description, matches each product with the rest to find the top X products that related to a product A, stores them all in database sorted by relatedness’s score. The process also takes into account the “manual” cross sell set up by the store owner.
When a customer views a specific product, the cross sell module will then list the related products using the pre-built set of data. As you may have guessed, building the relatedness set can takes some time if your store has a large set of products, luckily this can be done once and then the set must be updated only when you make significant changes to products’ names/description or adding new product(s).
The next step would be to suggest items based on user’s past purchase process and item-based filtering. We will look into the user’s orders in the past to find a set of other users that may fall into the same group and use their preference to suggest items to this specific user. We will also use the past orders to figure out sets of related items and make suggestion based on this. Our concern right now is to make the suggestion system as useful as possible (for the customers) while balancing other factors such as performance and speed. We will keep you updated with the process, feel free to comment and let us know if you want to try this out on your store. We will be glad to install it for you at no cost.
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