Recommendations are a selection of items on the website and in the mobile application that may be of interest to a specific user. The recommendation system is responsible for selecting relevant items and for the order of their display in a separate dedicated block on the website, located below the main item results.

General scheme of our recommendation system:

1. Preparation of user data

The system analyses user actions on our website and in the application for a period not exceeding 180 days:
- Viewing an item card
- Adding an item to favourites
- Adding an item to the basket
- Purchasing an item
On the basis of these actions, a rating of subcategories to which the relevant items belong is formed. A rating of categories is then calculated as the sum of the ratings of all included subcategories.
For selection, minimum threshold values are used:
- if the rating of a subcategory exceeds the threshold, it is included in the priority list,
- if no subcategory within a category reaches the threshold, but the category as a whole exceeds it, selection is made at category level.

2. Selection of candidates

For each relevant subcategory or category, items are selected taking into account current availability, chosen delivery time, and the possibility of delivery to the respective city. Priority is given to subcategories — a category is used only in the absence of suitable subcategories.
Sources of selection are:
-personal scores of the user,
- popular items in the category,
- popular items in the subcategory.

3. Filtering and updating

From the final list, items unavailable for purchase or delivery to the selected city are excluded. Duplicates between sources (for example, items that appear simultaneously through both a subcategory and a category) are also removed.

4. Final ranking

For the selected items, a final relevance score is calculated based on:
- ratings of subcategories and categories,
- the number of interactions with the item (taking into account a limit on awarding points for repeated actions with the same item),
- additional characteristics of the item, such as price, presence of reviews, shop rating and so on.

5. Displaying the items

The system transfers to widgets a limited number of items depending on the display location (usually up to 50 positions with the possibility of scrolling). Items are sorted in descending order of final relevance score. In the initial display, the 18 most relevant items are shown, the rest are loaded when clicking the ‘Show more’ button.
For the formation of recommendations, exclusively data on user actions collected on the Flowwow website and in the Flowwow mobile application are used. Information from third-party websites and services is not applied.