I use the "E-Commerce domain" together with the recommender "Recommended for you". But I'm pretty sure it applies also to the "Custom Domain" use-case together with the "USER_PERSONALIZATION recipe".
Goal 1. Make recommendations better for users which will register soon by sending events containing sessionId
Goal 2. Get recommendations for users which are not registered yet by sessionId
AWS specification says:
For new users, recommendations will initially be only for popular items. Starting with the first event, user recommendations will be more relevant as you record events
AWS spec also says: If you recorded events for a user before they logged in (an anonymous user), you can get recommendations for this user by providing the sessionId from those events instead of a userId. For more information about recording events for anonymous users, see PutEvents operation (p. 203)
Experiment
- Get recommendations for non-existing user A
- Get recommendations for non-existing user B (they will be the same)
- Send putEvent for non-existing user C without userId but with session ID for the product P1, send putEvent for user C with sessionId and userId for product P2. Get recommendations. After getting recommendations, we see that we got different results compared to user A/B
- Send putEvent for user D and product P2. Get recommendations. Check that you get different results compared to users A/B/C. After verification, I see that user D gets the same recommendations as user C. So it looks like sending events with sessionId but without userId do not affect recommendations
Also, it is not possible to make a GetRecommendations request by sending only sessionId parameter according to spec, as this method doesn't use sessionId as input parameter.
Do I missing something?