Transform product discovery with AI recommendations

Integrate AI-driven product recommendations, automated review summarization, and enhanced search capabilities into an e-commerce storefront.

RetailOpenShift AIPersonalization

This content is authored by Red Hat experts, but has not yet been tested on every supported configuration.

Transform product discovery with AI recommendations

Integrate AI-driven product recommendations, automated review summarization, and enhanced search capabilities into an e-commerce storefront.

Detailed description

This quickstart shows how an e-commerce storefront can seamlessly integrate AI-driven product recommendations, automated review summarization, and enhanced search capabilities to improve customer engagement and conversion rates.

  • Product recommendations deliver personalized suggestions based on browsing history and product similarity, helping customers discover what they love.
  • Review summaries distill countless reviews into actionable information, accelerating buying decisions.
  • Intelligent search uses a hybrid approach with semantic and symbolic search understanding customer intent, making it easier to find the perfect item.

See how customers can get a better experience while business owners unlock higher click-through rates, better conversations and strong customer loyalty.

This quickstart is a complete, cloud-native product recommender system showcasing search, recommendations, reviews, and a Kubeflow training pipeline on OpenShift AI. Technical components include:

  • Backend (FastAPI) with PostgreSQL + pgvector + Feast
  • Frontend (React) with semantic text/image search
  • Training pipeline (Kubeflow Pipelines) to build and push embeddings
  • Helm charts for one-command install/uninstall on OpenShift

Architecture diagrams

  • Feature Store: Feast (offline Parquet, online Postgres + pgvector)
  • Embeddings: Two-tower training + BGE text encoding for search
  • Search: Approximate Nearest Neighbor search over semantic vector embeddings
  • Images: Synthetic catalog images; text-to-image generated assets
Data Processing Pipeline Training & Batch Scoring Inference Search by Text/Image

Requirements

Prerequisites

  • Access to an OpenShift cluster (with OpenShift AI installed)
  • CLI tools: oc and helm
  • Container registry access to push images (e.g., quay.io)

Recommended OpenShift AI components enabled: DataSciencePipelines, Feast Operator, Model Registry, KServe/ModelMesh (Managed in your DataScienceCluster).

Minimum hardware requirements

  • CPU: 6-8 cores
  • Memory: 16-20Gi
  • Storage: 150-200Gi

Minimum software requirements

  • OpenShift 4.17.0+ cluster with OpenShift AI
  • oc CLI 4.17.0+ and Helm 3.x
  • Access to quay.io to be able to pull down container images

Required user permissions

  • Namespace admin permissions in the target OpenShift project
  • Container registry access to pull images from quay.io and registry.redhat.io
  • OpenShift AI access to create DataSciencePipelines and Feast components
  • Storage provisioning rights to create persistent volumes (PVCs)

Deploy

  1. Clone and enter the repo
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/product-recommender-system.git
cd product-recommender-system/helm
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
  1. Install
make install NAMESPACE=<namespace> minio.userId=<minio user Id> minio.password=<minio password> OLLAMA_MODEL=<ollama model name> MODEL_ENDPOINT=<http://model-url.com/v1>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

This deploys: Postgres+pgvector, Feast registry/secret, backend, frontend, and the training pipeline server.

  1. Access routes (after pods Ready)
# Frontend URL
FRONTEND=$(oc -n <ns> get route product-recommender-system-frontend -o jsonpath='{.spec.host}')
echo "https://$FRONTEND"

# Pipeline UI (DSP) URL
DSP=$(oc -n <ns> get route ds-pipeline-dspa -o jsonpath='{.spec.host}')
echo "https://$DSP"
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

Delete

make uninstall NAMESPACE=<ns>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

Additional details

Configuration you’ll change most often

  • Images
    • Backend+Frontend: frontendBackendImage in helm/product-recommender-system/values.yaml
    • Training: pipelineJobImage (training container image)
    • Core library (as a base in backend image): applicationImage (if used)
  • LLM for review generation (optional)
    • Set llm.secret.data.LLM_API_KEY (or bring your own secret)
    • Backend env: USE_LLM_FOR_REVIEWS, LLM_API_BASE, LLM_MODEL, LLM_TIMEOUT
  • Database/Feast integration
    • DB connection comes from the pgvector secret (created by the chart)
    • Feast TLS secret name: feast-feast-recommendation-registry-tls (mounted in backend & training)

How search works

  • Semantic Approximate Nearest Neighbor search over item text embeddings (BGE)

If you add more modalities (e.g., category vectors), stack only equal-dimension tensors or compute per-field similarities and fuse (max/weighted) without stacking.

AI Review Summarization

  • What it does: Uses an LLM to condense recent product reviews into a short, helpful summary covering sentiment, pros, cons, and an overall recommendation.
  • Endpoint:
    • GET /products/{product_id}/reviews/summarize — returns AI-generated summary text.
  • Notes:
    • Requires at least 4 reviews to produce a summary; otherwise returns a friendly message.
    • Review summary generated real time upon clicking the 'AI Summarize' button on the product page.

Detailed docs live in component READMEs:

  • recommendation-core/README.md
  • recommendation-training/README.md
  • backend/README.md
  • frontend/README.md
  • helm/README.md

Contributions

  • Contributions welcome via PRs; please update component READMEs when changing behavior
Back to top
Red Hat logoGithubredditYoutubeTwitter

Learn

Try, buy, & sell

Communities

About Red Hat Documentation

We help Red Hat users innovate and achieve their goals with our products and services with content they can trust. Explore our recent updates.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. For more details, see the Red Hat Blog.

About Red Hat

We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.

Theme

© 2026 Red Hat