Introduction to Sitecore Discover
Sitecore Discover is a powerful AI-driven product-search and merchandising solution that enables merchandisers and marketers to create personalized shopping experiences.
To deliver personalized search and recommendation experiences, Sitecore Discover tracks users' interactions on your website or app. The Discover AI system uses this data to learn visitor behavior and, based on learned behaviors, delivers personalized and targeted search results and recommendations. Over time, Discover uses the cumulative behavior information it collects across all users on the website to build recommendations based on AI recipes such as co-viewed and co-bought products, for example, (where co-viewed refers to products users viewed during a session, and co-bought refers to products users bought during a session).
Sitecore Discover uses advanced search technology, recommendation algorithms, user profiles based on visitor behaviors, and product profiles to deliver accurate, relevant search results.
The Discover widget rule framework lets you create and manage search and recommendation experiences customized to suit your business objective.
The Customer Engagement Console
The Customer Engagement Console (CEC) is the workbench that allows you to interact with the Sitecore Discover system to create and manage all aspects of Discover search and recommendation experiences across e-commerce channels.
Merchandisers, marketers, or other business users use the CEC to create and manage personalized search and recommendation experiences, or to gain insights on live Discover experiences by exploring analytics data.
Developers use the CEC to access developer resources such as the API explorer or the Events builder.
Administrators use the CEC to create users or manage other aspects of domain settings.
Pages and widgets
You create Discover experiences by configuring widgets and pages. As part of integrating with Discover, pages of your website or app are configured in the Customer Engagement Console (CEC). Discover pages are containers for widgets that encapsulate personalized experience. The various types of widgets that are placed on your pages provide search and recommendation experiences tailored to your business needs.
Sitecore Discover creates and updates a user profile for every site visitor. The main purpose of the profile is to provide context when creating a Discover experience. Widgets display personalized experiences built using these visitor profiles. For example, you can configure a widget to display different products to returning and first-time visitors. In this scenario, the driving context is whether the visitor is a first-time visitor.
You can define widget functionality using widget-level merchandising rules. With these rules, you pin, boost, bury, or blacklist products using product attributes such as categories, colors, product groupings, SKUs, and so on. For example, to promote a specific brand when a user interacts with a specific widget, you create a widget rule to always include products of that brand when displaying that widget.