Develop > Presentation layer > Customize marketing > Marketing customization: Management Center
Customize the Marketing tool to display catalog entry recommendations from an external system
Marketing managers can boost sales by displaying relevant catalog entry recommendations to customers in e-Marketing Spots on store pages.
To determine which catalog entries to recommend, the site might choose to use a system external to WebSphere Commerce, such as a product recommendation engine or a data warehouse. If so, WebSphere Commerce provides an infrastructure you can customize to retrieve the recommendations from the external system and display them to customers on the storefront.
The infrastructure provided for this customization consists of:
- A task command (Java class) you can extend to create the list of catalog entry recommendations to display to the customer.
- A Management Center user interface you can expose and customize to allow business users to specify the criteria on which to base the recommendation.
- Create the task command to retrieve external recommendations
By extending the DisplayExternalRecommendationActionTaskCmdImpl class, you can retrieve catalog entry recommendations from an external system for display on the store pages.
- Add support for external recommendations to the Management Center user interface
You can expose a prebuilt user interface that allows business users to define the criteria for displaying recommendations from external systems. By default, this user interface does not display in the Management Center Marketing tool because it is commented out in the code, but you can remove the comments. You might also need to customize the user interface to meet the business requirements.
Related tasks
Customize triggers, targets, and actions
Customize the palette and template picker contents
Customize e-Marketing Spot behavior
Work with the marketing component configuration file