product recommendation system

[isaac_cm]

I notice that the web full of ecommerce and shopping cart tutorials but I did not find only one tutorial for building a "product recommendation" system , it something like local ads when a customer select a product I want to display 2 or 3 recommended products to him

if phpfreaks do that tutorial it will be great

Thanks

[ober]

That's a pretty specific feature that you're looking for.  Not many people would really be interested in that.  The whole point of the tutorials is to show people how to do the most common things and you should be able to take one of those and adapt it to what you need for your system.

[isaac_cm]

I disagree "product recommendation" system is very common on many many sites now, sites requirements now is getting more complicated and more sophisticated than old traditions ways

however it is only a suggestion

[steelmanronald06]

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Okay Ober, your ready to reply ::)

[.josh]

I agree that 'product recommendation' features are pretty common on sites these days. However, it would be practically impossible to write a product recommendation tutorial. The problem with writing a tutorial explaining the actual code behind it is that the code would be very specific to your current system in place.  We would have to have an entire shopping cart/account example system in place already, to show how the 'product recommendation' would tie into it, from quering the database for things, to displaying it, etc. etc.. but it would only be a solution to our specific example cart, not your cart.  So on a practical level, the tutorial could only be on an application design level.  But even falling back on the application design, that in and of itself could get rather lengthy, and still wouldn't really be generic enough to be able to integrate into what you already have. 

Also, Different sites have different 'rules' or 'ideals' as far as things being recommended. For instance, some sites may simply include a 'recommended products' list as an alias for 'most popular items,' or 'highest rated items,' in which case, what you are really looking for is a product rating script.  What you would need to do is have a field in your database that keeps track of total times any given product was bought and/or a field (or even a whole new table, depending on how detailed you want it to be: ex: do you want it to keep track of who rated it? keep track of comments from the rater? etc..)  that keeps track of the product rating. Then your 'recommended items' script would be a simple query sorted by rating, limited to say, 3-5 products, or something.  Most shopping cart scripts have product rating systems of some sort already implemented into it. So making a 'recommended products' script like this is more a matter of moding a specific script than making something in general (impossible to make a generic tutorial out of).

Now, other sites might base their recommended products on related products.  If that is the case, you are going to have to modify your db structure to link products to each other.  This may or may not include making a whole new table, but again, 90% of it will involve what your database specifically looks like in the first place, so it's impossible to really write a generic structure for a tutorial.  And it would go even deeper, depending on your specific desires: do you want it to be your own custom list of items related to each other? Do you want it to be like "Users who bought this item also bought these items.."? Both? 

I could go on all day with this, but hopefully you got the point.  The point is, the problem with making a tutorial like this is that it is pretty much impossible to make a generic script for a custom solution.  It's like having a board full of lots of different holes that are lots of different shapes and sizes and trying to make a one size/shape fits all peg to fit into those holes.  Just not going to happen.

But that doesn't change the fact that you would like this feature for your shopping cart, so here's some practical advice for you:  If you designed and built your own shopping cart all by your onesies, then you probably (hopefully) wouldn't be asking a question like this in the first place.  So I'm going to assume that either a) you have a 3rd party script, or b) you [i]want[/i] to learn how to build one yourself, and you're looking for a more 'complete' tutorial, that includes this feature. 

Well if the answer is b), then don't worry about it.  By the time you finish your shopping cart tutorials, and have learned to build it by yourself up to that point, you should probably (hopefully) have gained the skills necessary to do what you want to in the first place.  But if the answer is a), then again, square peg into round hole thing.  Your easiest option will probably involve hiring someone to make a custom mod to your existing cart. 

[isaac_cm]

Thanks Crayon Violent for your.....rich advice,
I built a simple shopping cart but I found some sort of more complete one on a 3rd party script so I used that script which did not include a recommendation system

I really have many thoughts about making this system I gained from watching amazon and similar sites , but I can not use something complicated like data mining  used in amazon I need simple solution I can develop and understand myself

so if you see that I need a rating system , I gona ask you for a tutorial or reference to that system and my reason is "I am afraid to do something not good or did not comply to web standards" this what I would do when I do something for the first time I have to ask the experts, looking in ebooks and ask google but unfortunately I did not find what I want...  ???

thanks