How I Avoid Unwanted Shopping Recommendations Based on Past Purchases

Product recommendations are an important feature of modern shopping websites, allowing you to discover products you may not even know exist. However, this feature can sometimes become frustrating and display unnecessary recommendations, but there are ways to fix this.

1

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Online shopping sites use algorithms to refine recommendations and show you products you might like. These algorithms take into account your clicking habits, products you have opened, or past purchases. Using this data, the website can display products you might like, but sometimes they can be skewed.

Therefore, the ideal way to avoid irrelevant recommendations is to set up a new account so that the algorithm can start over and learn from scratch. But this may not always be possible or what you want to do. However, with a few tweaks, you can tweak your existing algorithm.

2

Refine and manage saved projects

Shopping sites like Amazon have wish lists, which are lists of items that you save to review later. Amazon considers this list when recommending products to you. You’re more likely to see similar suggestions if you have unrelated products on your wish list. Therefore, you need to effectively tell the website what products you like by removing irrelevant items from your wishlist or adding items that you want the website to recommend.

For example, if you shop for gadgets and electronics on Amazon but also add skincare to your wish list, you might receive skincare-related recommendations.

In order to access your listing on Amazon, you can do the following:

1. Hover your cursor over the account name in the upper right corner.

2. You can find your wish list in the left half of the drop-down menu.

Now, go through your wish list and delete any irrelevant or outdated items.

3

Fine-tune preferences

Another data point used to recommend products is your viewing history, i.e. the products you have clicked on and spent time viewing in the past. Amazon and other retailers use your browsing history to indicate products you like, which it then shows you. To resolve this issue, you need to delete irrelevant items from your history or past purchases.

1. Hover your cursor over the account name in the upper right corner.

2. Click Browsing history.

3. Under each item you will find Remove from View.

You can further improve your suggestions by:

1. Hover your cursor over the account name in the upper right corner.

2. choose suggestion.

3. Click on any product and then Delete this suggestion.

Unfortunately, since new products are added frequently, there’s no complete guarantee that it will work, but it may help you remove specific items.

4

Interact or look for things intentionally

On sites like Netflix and YouTube, the content you see is heavily influenced by your searches, views, and interactions. When you intentionally interact with a post or movie, the algorithm assumes you like those items, which is why your YouTube recommendations may also show irrelevant results. The same applies to shopping sites. When you intentionally search for items or open them, you are essentially training the algorithm to recommend similar things.

For example, if I’m interested in buying tech products or hardware for my computer setup, I’ll go to Amazon and start searching for them and interacting with similar items. Over time, websites will recognize this and start recommending technology-related products. This is exactly what you need to do for the product categories you want to recommend. In addition, when shopping online, it is best to bring Privacy measures to protect you from targeted advertisingbecause websites can track your online activity and display ads that can disrupt your online experience.

5

Use separate accounts for different interests

When you need to buy something unusual, such as a gift or other products outside of your normal buying pattern, the best way is to use a separate account. This way, any purchases you make will remain in the secondary account and won’t affect your primary account. You can create multiple profiles on Amazon with their own purchase history, listings, and recommendations. That way, anything you do in the second profile will remain there. This helps effectively differentiate between inappropriate purchases and browsing.