This article is relevant only to the Restaurants vertical
Business rules help ensure your A/B tests align with your strategy and broader market goals by making experiments purposeful and directly tied to your overall KPIs. They allow you to apply business constraints and promotional logic on top of algorithmic recommendations, ensuring results remain relevant, controllable, and measurable.
The following table provides a list of business rules and how to use them.
| Business Rule | Description |
|---|---|
| Include | Restricts recommendations to only items that meet the defined rule condition. Use this rule to guarantee that a specific set of items is always eligible for recommendation. |
| Exclude | Prevents items that match the defined rule condition from appearing in recommendations. Use this rule to remove specific products or categories from an experiment. |
| Skip | Prevents a recommendation from being served when specific conditions are met—most commonly based on items already in the customer’s basket.
|
| Basket Based | Basket-Based rules dynamically adjust recommendations based on the customer’s basket contents. |
| PIN | Pins a specific product to a selected widget slot, overriding the standard recommendation strategy. The PIN rule holds the highest priority over all conflicting rules and can optionally be defined with a specific start and end date. |
Business Rule Interactions
When personalizing recommendations, multiple business rules can apply at the same time. Recommended items must meet all active rules.
The table below explains how rules work together when applied to different slots in a single campaign.
| Rule 1 | Rule 2 | How the Rules Work Together |
|---|---|---|
| Include | Include | Only items that satisfy both Include rules are shown |
| Include | Exclude | Only items that satisfy the Include rule and are not blocked by the Exclude rule are shown |
| Include | Skip | Skip takes priority; the recommendation is not shown |
| Include | Basket-Based | Only items that satisfy both the Include rule and the Basket-Based rule are shown |
| Include | PIN | Pin items are shown first; if none can be recommended, items that satisfy the Include rule are shown |
| Exclude | Exclude | Items are removed if they match either Exclude rule |
| Exclude | Include | Only items that satisfy the Include rule and are not blocked by the Exclude rule are shown |
| Exclude | Skip | Skip takes priority; the recommendation is not shown |
| Exclude | Basket-Based | Only items that satisfy the Basket-Based rule and are not blocked by the Exclude rule are shown |
| Exclude | PIN | Pin items are shown first; if none can be recommended, Exclude rules are applied |
| Skip | Any Rule | Skip always takes priority and cancels the recommendation |
| Basket-Based | Basket-Based | Only items that satisfy both Basket-Based conditions are shown |
| Basket-Based | Include | Only items that satisfy both the Basket-Based rule and the Include rule are shown |
| Basket-Based | Exclude | Only items that satisfy the Basket-Based rule and are not blocked by the Exclude rule are shown |
| Basket-Based | Skip | Skip takes priority; the recommendation is not shown |
| Basket-Based | PIN | Pin items are shown first; if none can be recommended, Basket-Based logic is applied |
| PIN | Any Rule | Pin items are shown first; if none can be recommended, other rules in the slot are applied |