I've spent way too much time trying to setup recommendations using Adobe Target. Here is what I've done and the issues I'm facing.
Successfully:
1. Uploaded a data feed to populate ~4k products into the catalog (Status shows I'm good to go)
2. Setup a recommendation activity. Using VEC it shows great, using a 3x1 design, and a custom criteria.
3. Custom criteria is using "Current Item" and static filter like thumbnail is present
4. I set an entity.id and category.id on all pages
Issues:
1. I'm not getting anything to display when I visit one of the pages
2. Target mbox shows the entity.id and category.id are populated
One main question I have is do entities have to be seen by a visitor and sent fired in the Adobe Target mbox before it qualifies to be used in a recommendation? Or can the catalog suffice?
When I debug the recommendation I see the data source is mbox and based on 14 days but seems stupid that I can't recommend items if they are in the catalog.
Can't I just do this: If user is on page = x, show recommendations (articles) with author = y and it returns catalog items that have an author = y regardless of if that entity was hit in an mobx?