Existing Applications and Explicit Recommendations

Some Salesforce B2C Commerce storefront applications were developed using the product linking feature. This feature pre-dated the explicit recommendations feature in Business Manager and requires added considerations.

You can define product-to-product relationships to provide for replacement products, cross-sells, up-sells accessories, follow-up, a different order unit or spare parts. With the product linking feature, you define simple links between products. For example, linking older versions of a product with newer versions.

If you use the product links feature, you do not need to convert to the recommendations feature. B2C Commerce also supports product linking. However, enhancements are made only to the recommendations feature.

With a product linking and explicit recommendation implementation, you can:

• Create added recommendation types through custom attribute definitions.
• Define the presentation logic for the additional recommendations within UX Studio in your storefront cartridge.

When using both features, keep the following in mind:

• Product links conceptually are intended for fundamental relationships between products. For example, product-to-part relationships.
• Recommendations can appear only on a site if the storefront catalog contains the recommendation. Product links are not directly stored in a catalog and don't have this restriction.
• Recommendations are system objects and can have custom attributes. Product links can't have custom attributes.

Some reasons for moving away from a product linking implementation and switching to or adding recommendations include:

• Implementing category to product recommendations.
• Using recommendation-specific attributes (for example, name, short description, long description, callout message, or image). These attributes let you customize the presentation of a specific product based on the target object and recommendation type.