Suggesting Similar Items to Buy

When a customer purchases or searches for an item, they demonstrate an interest. As a developer, you can capitalize on that fact by suggesting to the customer similar items they might also like to buy. Add-on purchases is a powerful means of quickly increasing sales.

Similarity is based on items that customers bought, that is, customers who bought X also bought Y. This algorithm is different from one based on items viewed, for example. Basing the algorithm on purchases rather than viewing assures you that the similar items are more likely to be of interest to the customer.

ECS provides the following means of returning a list of similar items.

Typically, the Similarities response group is used to find item IDs that are similar to the items returned in a response. To return extended information about those items, you could use the similar item IDs in ItemLookup requests.

Alternately, if you know the ID of the item for which you want similar items, you can use the SimilarityLookup operation to return extended information about each similar item.