Introduction to Sitecore Discover

Sitecore Discover provides AI-powered, merchandiser-controlled experiences that you can integrate with your website or any other online point of contact. There are three main areas to consider when integrating Discover experiences with your website or application:

  • Product information

  • Visitor information

  • Search and recommendation experiences

Discover supports a variety of integration methods you can choose from to meet the requirements of your specific integration scenario.

Note

Sitecore has deprecated the following integration methods:

  • Hosted pages with Discover

  • Using Discover runtime JS

We recommend that you use the Discover JS SDK to integrate your website or the Discover API for a website or application integration.

Product information

Every Sitecore Discover implementation requires that you preload and continue to maintain your product data into Discover. Discover provides predefined product attributes that you can map to your own product data attributes.

To keep your data up-to-date in Sitecore Discover, it is common practice to schedule an automated full product data feed to run at least once per day. Depending on your business requirements, multiple daily transfers might be required to keep product data stored in Discover in sync with your main system of record. For real-time updates to attributes of products that already exist in Discover, you can use the Incremental Feed API.

Visitor information

Visitor information consists of website visitor tracking, that is, visitor runtime anonymous identification. This information is essential for everything that Discover does, including personalization, rules targeting, data set generation, and analytics.

If you use the Discover JS SDK for React to integrate Discover experiences, the SDK handles visitor tracking natively.

The Discover runtime JS integration method uses the Discover Beacon to automate visitor tracking on e-commerce websites. The Beacon collects just the necessary information that Discover requires to provide a personalized digital experience.

If you are integrating Discover experiences on a mobile native app or prefer to limit the use of beacons on your website, you can use the Sitecore Discover Events API to track visitor information.

Personalization experiences

The integration of Sitecore Discover personalization experiences refers to the process of connecting with Discover to present relevant products to a specific audience at the right time. We recommend that you integrate Discover personalization experiences everywhere that you expose product search capability or where merchandising is displayed so that every point of contact is connected to common visitor and product profile databases.

The following lists some of the most common experiences you can integrate:

  • Preview search, which provides visual autocomplete functionality in the search field

  • Search results page

  • Landing pages, and product listing pages

  • Product details page recommendations

  • Collection pages recommendations

  • Home page recommendations

  • Cart page recommendations

  • No results recommendations

  • Discover Your Like recommendations

  • Just For You recommendations

  • Promotion email recommendations

  • Personalized banners and HTML blocks

Widget and funnel events

Widget and funnel events are streamed into the Discover platform and provide the intelligence the system requires to compute visitor affinities. This allows Discover to personalize the next set of things site visitors see on an e-commerce channel.

Sitecore Discover Events also power a suite of Discover analytic reports available by default that provide business users with deep merchandising performance insights.

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