 Product Recommendations  Managing Product Recommendations  Types of Product Recommendations  Product Out of Stock  Out of Stock Management  Let me know when Product is back in Stock

 Product Recommendation is a process of showing some products to customers  This recommendation is based on:  Few products go hand in hand (sale out)  Mostly customers are interested in certain products  suggest some relevant products to our customers based on their previous purchase  There are two ways of Product Recommendations  Displaying related products on a products page  ing customers who have made certain purchases to inform them

 Simplest way is to show related products within the product view/page  It needs relationship among products within table  If there is relationship among product  Display these products as recommended products within product view  Else, show only product information  How can we maintain relationship among products within model/database/table?

 Following are the ways to maintain relationship among products  Within the products table we maintain a serialized array of related product IDs  We group related products together by themes  We relate pairs of related products together  A serialized array isn't the most effective way to store related product data  Relating them by themes would prove problematic with multiple themes  Relating pairs of products together would require a little trick with the query to get the product name

 To maintain pairs of relating products the following table structure:  ID (Integer, Primary Key, Auto Increment)  ProductA (Integer)  ProductB (Integer)  How to differ between ProductA and ProductB?  ProductA : the product we were currently viewing  ProductB : the related one, productB

 Controller of the product recommendations will perform the following functions  Return random related products  Cache results  Associated cached results with template variabale  Controller required only current product id to perform above functionality  View contains only following code

 Recommendations  recommendations should involve the following features 1. Search customers with previous purchases that match a subset of the product catalog 1.for example customers who purchased a red t-shirt and a red baseball cap 2. Select products that are related to the subset and we think those customers would be interested in 3. Generate an based on those products, a set template, and other content we may wish to supply 4. Send the to all of the customers found in step 1

 Product out of stock means  Product is not available to sale  Product has zero in quantity in warehouse  When product is back in stock, customer must inform about product availability  Customer should must signup for this service  If we don’t inform to customer about availability  Customer lefts the site and go elsewhere  He will not back to check regularly stock level

 We need the following steps to manage out of stock products 1. we need to take into account stock levels 2. If a product has no stock, we need to insert a new template bit with an "alert me when it is back in stock" form. 3. We need a template to be inserted when this is the case 4. We then need functionality to capture and store the customer's address, and possibly their name, so that they can be informed when it is back in stock.

5. Next, we need to be able to inform all of the customers who expressed an interest in a particular product when it is back in stock. 6. Once our customers have been informed of the new stock level of the product, we need to remove their details from the database to prevent them from being informed at a later stage that there are more products in stock. 7. Finally, we will also require an template, which will be used when sending the alerts to our customers

 Not all products required stock level to maintain  Tangible products required stock level  Non-Tangible products required no stock level  To maintain stock level for a product we need  A column in Product table for stock value  Stock column may have following values  Zero value: means product is out of stock  >zero vale: means product is in stock  <zero value: means stock entry is not required for this product

 Another way, is to create two new columns in Product table  Stock: store stock numeric +ve value  Stock_Required: for a check, either stock is required for particular product or not?  Stock Column has integer value >=zero  Stock Required has Boolean value (true, false)  This method is not encouraging because  We need to maintain additional checks  And additional column in table

 We need simple checks on stock value column

 We need two things in template if producti s out of stock  Out of stock message to customer for inforamtion  A form to collect customer information to inform him when product is in stock

What happens when we click on this button

 Once a customer has entered their name, address, and clicked on the submit button  We need to store these details in database  Associate each entry with a product that is currently out of stock  This involves a new database table  A table to maintain the relationship between products and customers  Only those customers who wish to be notified when products are back in stock

 New table required only five columns Column NameData TypeDescription IDInteger (Primary Key, Auto Increment) The ID for the stock alert request CustomerVarcharThe customer's name VarcharThe customer's address ProductIDIntegerThe ID of the product the customer wishes to be informed about when it is back in stock ProcessedBooleanEither informed to customer or not

 Alert those customers that the product which they were interested in is back in stock and they can purchase it now  What is involved in this process?  The administrator alters the stock level  Customers interested in that product are looked up  s for each of those customers are generated with relevant detail  s are sent to the customers  Delete records of processed alerts from database How ?