How to set up product recommendations in email

Setting the Products block’s Source to Recommendations can rank products by Bestsellers, Back in stock, Price drop, New arrivals, Bought together, or Based on what they viewed, without you picking products or writing a catalog rule. See Get recommended products for every field this source adds. Three of those strategies need data from outside your catalog to work: Bestsellers reads your order history, and Bought together and Based on what they viewed read what shoppers have looked at and bought. This guide covers what to send so each strategy has something to rank.

Dica

Already sending PW_AbandonedCart and PW_OrderCreated for abandoned cart recovery? Keep reading. Bestsellers needs one more field on PW_OrderCreated that the abandoned cart guide doesn’t cover.

Before you begin

Make sure your account’s catalog has products in it. Go to Content → Product Catalog and connect a feed, import a CSV, or add products by hand. Learn how to populate your catalog.

Developer assistance needed

Sending the events below requires your development team’s help, unless your store integration already sends them for you. Please share this guide with them.

New accounts see the regular catalog first

Every strategy below needs history to accumulate before it can rank anything. Until then, the block shows the regular catalog instead. See the note under Get recommended products.

Which strategies need events

Three of the six strategies rank products from events you send; the other three rank directly off your catalog and need nothing from you.

Strategy	Needs events?	Data source
Back in stock	No	Catalog stock changes
Price drop	No	Catalog price changes
New arrivals	No	Catalog “added” date
Bestsellers (7/30 days)	Yes	PW_OrderCreated / PW_OrderUpdated with items
Based on what they viewed	Yes	Any event carrying a product ID
Bought together	Yes	Any event carrying a product ID, plus a device tag

A stock or price change in your feed, or the next scheduled sync, updates Back in stock, Price drop, and New arrivals automatically. Nothing to send for those three.

Bestsellers: add items to your order events

Bestsellers (7 days) and Bestsellers (30 days) rank products by how many units sold in that window. They read the items array on PW_OrderCreated and PW_OrderUpdated, specifically each item’s productId and quantity.

If you already send PW_OrderCreated to clear abandoned cart tags, that minimal call (just orderId) still clears the cart, but it gives Bestsellers nothing to count. Add the order’s line items to the same call:

{
  "request": {
    "hwid": "8f65b16df378e7a6bece9614e1530fb2",
    "application": "XXXXX-XXXXX",
    "event": "PW_OrderCreated",
    "attributes": {
      "orderId": "ORDER-10293",
      "items": [
        {
          "productId": "SKU-4821",
          "quantity": 1
        },
        {
          "productId": "SKU-5190",
          "quantity": 2
        }
      ]
    },
    "userId": "shopper@example.com"
  }
}

productId must match the ID your Product Catalog uses for that item, so Bestsellers can look up the product to show. Extra item fields (price, name, and so on) are ignored for this strategy. Only productId and quantity count toward the ranking. Send the same items array on PW_OrderUpdated for order edits, refunds, or partial cancellations, since Bestsellers recounts from whatever the latest event for that order says.

Send quantity as a number

Use a real JSON number for quantity, not a quoted string. Pushwoosh stores each attribute value only in the type it was first declared or inferred with; a mismatched value is dropped silently, and postEvent still returns success. See Use the correct attribute types for the same caution on PW_AbandonedCart.

Nota

Bestsellers ranks by order history specifically. Views and cart activity don’t count. For a ranking that includes browsing and cart activity too, use Based on what they viewed or Bought together instead.

Based on what they viewed and Bought together: track product activity

Both strategies build from the same signal: events that carry a product ID. You don’t need a dedicated “product viewed” event name — any custom event sent via postEvent counts, as long as its attributes include one of these keys:

• A single product, as a top-level attribute: product_id, productId, productid, item_id, or sku.
• Multiple products, as a products array where each item has product_id, productId, id, or sku.

For example, fire your existing product-view event with a product ID attribute already on it:

{
  "request": {
    "hwid": "8f65b16df378e7a6bece9614e1530fb2",
    "application": "XXXXX-XXXXX",
    "event": "ProductViewed",
    "attributes": {
      "product_id": "SKU-4821",
      "category": "Audio"
    },
    "userId": "shopper@example.com"
  }
}

Based on what they viewed ranks each shopper’s own recently interacted-with products — no further setup needed once the events above are flowing.

Bought together ranks products frequently purchased alongside one anchor product, across your whole account’s history. It needs one more thing: a Product tag, a device tag that holds the current anchor product’s ID. Set the field’s name when you configure the strategy in the Products block (for example PW_LastViewedProductID), then keep that tag updated on each device. For example, set it to the product’s ID whenever the shopper views a product. Without the tag set on a recipient, the block falls back to the regular catalog for them.

Tag name rules

The tag name only accepts letters, digits, underscores, and spaces, since it has to be addressable in Liquid. See Bought together needs a Product tag.

Confirm your events are landing

Before you add the block, check that Pushwoosh is actually receiving the events above: go to Audience → Events, open the event you sent (PW_OrderCreated or the custom event carrying a product ID), and confirm recent hits show up. See Event statistics.

Nota

An empty Products block can mean either “the events never arrived” or “not enough history has accumulated yet” (see the note above). Event statistics rules out the first cause before you chase the second.

Add the block to your email

Add a Products block to your email content, set Source to Recommendations, and pick a Strategy. See Get recommended products for every field in the settings panel. Click Refresh preview to check the canvas fills with real products before you send.