Building a Custom Recommendation Engine for a Souvenir Seed Catalog

One of my favorite recent projects started with a simple question:

How do you help customers find the right product when they are faced with a large catalog of options?

A client with an extensive souvenir seed catalog wanted a better way for visitors to explore products and discover varieties that matched what they were looking for. Instead of relying only on traditional category pages and filters, we created an interactive recommendation tool.

The result was Build Your Soldier, a custom product recommendation engine that guides visitors through a series of questions and matches them with products based on their answers.

Try the Build Your Soldier tool here.

From Catalog to Guided Experience

Most online stores expect customers to already know what they want. But sometimes a customer only knows the general direction. They may know they want something fruity, beginner-friendly, high-yielding, unique, or tied to a certain product line, but they may not know which item in the catalog fits best.

That is where a custom recommendation engine can help.

Instead of making visitors scroll through dozens of product pages, the tool asks simple questions and uses the answers to narrow down the catalog. Behind the scenes, the system compares those answers against product tags, descriptions, traits, and other catalog data to recommend the best match.

Cleaning Up the Data First

One thing I quickly realized while building this tool was that the recommendations would only be as good as the product data behind them.

That meant going through the catalog and improving the tagging system so the tool had useful information to work with. Products needed to be organized by flavor notes, traits, experience level, yield, product lines, and other helpful details.

That part was not flashy, but it made the entire system smarter.

More Than a Quiz

This project became much more than a simple quiz.

The tool includes custom scoring logic, product matching, analytics tracking, share options, and a live leaderboard showing which products are being recommended most often.

One of my favorite additions is the Top Recruit Pick badge. As visitors use the tool, the site tracks which product is being recruited the most. The current top pick automatically receives a badge on its product page, helping connect customer behavior back into the shopping experience.

Why This Kind of Tool Matters

Custom tools like this can do more than make a website feel fun. They can help customers make decisions, encourage them to explore more products, and give business owners insight into what visitors are actually interested in.

Instead of guessing what people care about, the site can start collecting useful patterns:

• Which products are recommended most often
• Which recommendations people click through to view
• Which product traits customers seem most interested in
• How visitors are interacting with the catalog

That kind of information can be incredibly useful for future marketing, product planning, and website improvements.

Websites Should Do More

This is the kind of project I love building because it turns a website into more than a place to display information.

Sometimes a website should guide.

Sometimes it should calculate.

Sometimes it should recommend.

And sometimes it should take the knowledge inside a business owner’s head and turn it into an experience customers can actually use.

That is where custom website tools get really exciting.

If you have a product catalog, quote process, calculator, ordering system, or customer workflow that could be easier, smarter, or more interactive, that is exactly the kind of project I love helping with.