Sending Product-View Events

When you need to explicitly send an event to Nosto to tell it that the user has viewed a certain product, you must do so manually. A need for something like this arises when your website has a quick-view function on the category or search pages that enables the customer to preview the product in an overlay without actually navigating to the product page.

nostojs(api => {
  api.createRecommendationRequest()
    .setProducts([{product_id: 'product-id-101'}])
    .load();
});

Note: The example above creates a new request, adds view product event for product-id-101 and sends the event to Nosto. Since the request did not specify any recommendation slots, this request only submits view event to Nosto.

To learn more about the setProducts usage, please refer to the official API documentation.

You can either create an empty request as in the above example and add only the wanted parts to it, or you can create a request based on the tagging on the page by using the includeTagging field and then modify it. Here is an example that creates a request using the tagging on the page and then overrides the current tag to be custom color to update the recommendation with id productpage-nosto-2 to show only products with the same color:

nostojs(api => {
  api.createRecommendationRequest({includeTagging:true})
    .setCurrentTags(["color:red"])
    .setElements(["productpage-nosto-2"])
    .load()
    .then(response => {
      console.log(response);
    });
});

To learn more about the setCurrentTags usage, please refer to the official API documentation.

In addition to the filtering by product tags, you're also able to filter using product attributes. Here is an example that creates a request using the tagging on the page and then overrides the current tag to be custom color red, to update the recommendation with id productpage-nosto-3 and to show only cotton material products for men of the same color (red):

nostojs(api => {
  api.createRecommendationRequest({includeTagging:true})
    .setCurrentTags(["color:red"])
    .addCurrentCustomFields({gender: "male", material: "cotton"})
    .setElements(["productpage-nosto-3"])
    .load()
    .then(response => {
      console.log(response);
    });

In many cases leveraging the existing tagging on the page and then overriding the specific parts is simpler and more robust.

To learn more about the addCurrentCustomFields usage, please refer to the official API documentation.

Attribution for recommended Products

In case the request is built completely manually, it needs to include also the attribution information for click tracking. Below is an example which shows how that can be done for product views that result from clicking on a Nosto recommendation slot.

In the event that the product was viewed due to a click on a Nosto recommendation slot, you must send an additional parameter that denotes the identifier of the recommendation slot that was clicked. If this is done inside of recommendation template identifier of recommendation slot can be get from property $!product.attributionKey

nostojs(api => {
   var request = api.createRecommendationRequest()
     .setProducts([{product_id: 'product-id-101'}], 'recommendation-id')
     .load();
});

Note: Failure to do will result in incorrect attribution statistics.

Sending Product Variant-view Events

Optional event that can be sent to signal that a specific product variant (SKU in Nosto terms) is being viewed. Typical use case for sending this event would be from product detail page when the user selects a product variant, such as some specific color and/or size. The recommendations can then be configured to update and give preference for products that have similar variants available. For example "Other products also available in the same size".

nostojs(api => {
  api.createRecommendationRequest({includeTagging:true})
    .setProducts([{product_id: '6961338417345', selected_sku_id: '40822930473153'}])
    .load()
    .then(response => {
      console.log(response);
    });
});

See also

To learn more about the createRecommendationRequest usage, please refer to the official API documentation.

For more information on setElements usage, refer to this API documentation