A complete guide to Magento AI behavior-based recommendations

In the world of ecommerce, getting personal with your customers isn't just a nice touch, it's pretty much everything. Showing the right product to the right person at the right time is what turns a casual browser into a happy customer. It’s how you nudge up your average order value (AOV) and see those conversion rates climb.

If you're running a Magento store, using Magento AI behavior-based recommendations is one of the smartest ways to make that connection. This guide will walk you through what you need to know, from Magento's own AI tools with Adobe Sensei to some great third-party options. We’ll also look at how a simple conversation with an AI can be a much better way to help customers find what they’re looking for.

What are Magento AI behavior-based recommendations?

In short, it’s about using AI to watch how a shopper moves through your site, what they click on, what they view, what they add to their cart, and what they’ve bought before. The AI then uses all that information to suggest other products they’ll probably like.

This is a huge leap from the old days of manually picking "related products" and hoping for the best.

Why is it so different?

• It's all automatic, which saves you hours of guesswork and trying to merchandise your site by hand.

• It’s tailored to each person, making their visit feel like it was designed just for them.

• It often finds interesting connections between products that you might never have thought of on your own.

These recommendations are powered by two kinds of information:

1. Behavioral Data: This is everything a shopper does on your site, from the products they look at to the things they buy.

2. Catalog Data: This is all the info about your products, like their names, prices, categories, and other details.

The AI takes both sets of data, finds the patterns, and serves up a relevant recommendation right when it matters most.

The built-in option: How Magento AI behavior-based recommendations work with Adobe Sensei

For those on Adobe Commerce, Magento has a powerful solution built right in, powered by Adobe Sensei. Think of it as the AI engine running behind the scenes in many of Adobe's products. It’s designed to be an integrated, ready-to-go tool for adding a personal touch to your store.

Adobe Sensei puts a piece of JavaScript on your site to track what shoppers are doing. That data, mixed with your product catalog, fuels a few different types of recommendations.

• Viewed-Viewed: Shows products that other people often look at together. It’s great for helping customers discover new things and usually shows up as "Customers who viewed this also viewed..."

• Viewed-Bought: Suggests items that people frequently buy after looking at a certain product. This is a perfect way to offer up an accessory or a matching item.

• Bought-Bought: This one shows products that are often bought together in the same order. It’s a classic cross-sell for your cart page.

• Recommended for You: This is where it gets truly personal. The AI looks at a single user’s entire browsing history to create a list of suggestions just for them.

• Trending: Shows what’s popular on your site right now, which can create a sense of urgency and social proof.

• Visual Similarity: The AI finds products that look similar to the one a customer is viewing. This works incredibly well for stores selling fashion, furniture, or anything where looks are key.

You can set up and manage all of this right from the Magento Admin panel, which makes it a fairly simple way to get started with AI.

This image shows an example of Magento's AI-powered visual similarity search, a key feature of its behavior-based recommendations.

Limitations of the native approach

While Adobe Sensei is a solid tool, it’s not without its quirks.

• Platform Lock-in: The biggest catch is that it's only available if you're an Adobe Commerce customer. If you're on the free Magento Open Source version, you'll have to look for another option.

• "Black Box" Logic: The AI does its thing automatically, which is simple. But it also means you have very little say in why it shows certain products. If you want to push high-margin items or a specific brand, you can't really nudge the AI in that direction.

• Data Hungry: AI needs a good amount of data to learn and get smart. If you have a brand-new store or don't get a lot of traffic, it can take a while for the recommendations to be accurate and effective.

• It’s a One-Way Street: This is probably the biggest drawback. Adobe Sensei can show products to a user, but it can’t answer a simple question. If a customer sees a jacket they like and wonders, "Does this come in blue?" they have to click away and search for the answer themselves. That little bit of friction is often enough to lose a sale or create a support ticket.

Expanding your options: Top third-party extensions

If you're using Magento Open Source or just need more control than Adobe Sensei gives you, the world of third-party extensions is your friend. These plugins can add some serious recommendation power and let you fine-tune your personalization strategy.

Here’s a quick look at some of the popular tools out there:

These tools usually fit into a few different buckets:

• Personalization Suites (like Nosto): These are big, comprehensive platforms that do more than just show product carousels. They can trigger personalized pop-ups, change website content on the fly, and even connect with your email marketing.

• AI Search & Discovery (like Searchspring, Klevu): These tools basically put your site's search bar on steroids. They use natural language processing to figure out what a customer is really looking for, even if they misspell something or use a different word for it.

• Dedicated Magento Extensions (like Amasty, Mirasvit): These are built from the ground up for Magento. They often give you a mix of AI suggestions and manual controls, so you can let the AI run the show or step in and create your own rules when you need to.

What to watch out for with third-party extensions

While extensions give you more power, they come with their own set of things to keep in mind.

• Complexity and Cost: The most powerful tools can be expensive, and they often need a developer to get them installed and configured properly. This can add a good chunk of cost and technical headache to your setup.

• A Patchwork Experience: Using different extensions for search, recommendations, and pop-ups can sometimes feel a bit disjointed for the customer. It can also slow down your site if you’re not careful.

• Still Not a Conversation: Just like the built-in tools, these are still just widgets. They can't answer a customer's specific question like, "Is this camera compatible with the lens I bought last month?" This is where most recommendation engines hit a wall, leaving customers stuck and your support team answering the same questions over and over.

Going beyond widgets with conversational AI

So, what happens when a customer has a question that a product carousel just can't answer? This is where a lot of sales get lost and support tickets get made. The usual recommendation tools are great when someone is just browsing, but they fall short the moment a customer has a specific question.

This is where a good AI chatbot changes the game. Instead of just showing a static grid of products, it can act like a personal shopper who’s available 24/7. It can:

• Understand normal questions like, "I'm looking for vegan leather boots under $100."

• Ask follow-up questions to help narrow down the choices.

• Give instant, personalized recommendations based on what you're actually talking about.

How eesel AI bridges the gap for Magento stores

A tool like eesel AI turns product discovery from a one-way broadcast into a two-way conversation.

It connects directly to your ecommerce store’s product catalog, so it can pull up-to-date product info to answer questions correctly. But here's what makes it different: while other tools only know about your products, eesel AI knows about your entire business. It can connect to your help articles, past support tickets, and even internal documents in Google Docs or Confluence. This means it can answer a pre-sales question like "What's your return policy?" and then recommend the perfect product, all in the same chat.

The best part? You don't need a team of developers to set it up. You can connect your knowledge sources to eesel AI and have it running in minutes. It acts as both a recommendation engine and a support agent, helping customers find the right product and answering their questions along the way. This smooths out the buying process, helps boost conversions, and frees up your human agents to deal with the trickier issues.

The future of recommendations is a conversation

We’ve looked at three main ways to handle AI-powered recommendations: the built-in Adobe Sensei tool (easy but limited), third-party extensions (flexible but can be complex), and conversational AI (holistic and focused on the customer).

While those visual recommendation widgets are still a key part of any Magento store, the next step is to add an interactive, conversational layer on top. That’s how you build a truly personal shopping journey that guides customers from the moment they land on your site all the way to checkout.

It might be time to stop losing customers in that gap between seeing a recommendation and getting an answer. A solution that can handle the whole journey, not just a small part of it, could make all the difference.