Thanks Barney, that sounds interesting. Taking your model to the practical level, that would imply that when the admin users are maintaining the database they'll see a product update form, that also includes a list of products to flag as being associated. When they're updating the products in the cleaning chemicals category for example, they'll see checkboxes against mops, buckets they can add to the associations for that product.
Is that kind of how it would work? Then on the display side of the site, the customer pages would populate the 'related items' box with items on special, associated products and finally actual purchases? Is that how you'd see it? Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Barney Boisvert <bboisv...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Well, using actual purchases is the best bet, but also the least > targeted. With the scale of Amazon the biggest win is in providing > the best recommendations If you're a small shop, on the other hand, > you probably want a slight bias towards higher margin products because > those do the most for your bottom line. Further, you'll probably want > to highlight product X as part of a promotion. > > So for a small shop, you probably want to have some sort of > transaction-based recommendations as the base layer, but add the > ability to seed those recommendations with manually specified items as > well. As a half-way, seeding each product category with specified > items would be another option. So when it came time to list, you'd > check for any related items specific to the current item, then items > based on multi-item transactions containing the current item, and > finally any items bound to the current item's category. Obviously > you'd stop once you found a sufficient number. > > As the scale increases, specific product bindings become both less > valuable and impossible to maintain, and category stuff drifts to > irrelevance very quickly after a new product is introduced, so you're > left with only the transaction-based stuff. > > Also worth mentioning that if you're doing "also bought", that's quite > different from "similar items", so your product and category > associations need to reflect the right one. E.g. if I'm shopping for > a new game console "also bought" should contain a second controller > and some AV cables, while "similar items" should contain other > versions/packages of the same console and perhaps other consoles as > well. So make sure what you're building is well understood by all the > stakeholders, including the eventual site visitors. > > cheers, > ba ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:321438 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
