How I Avoid Unwanted Shopping Recommendations Based on Past Purchases

Product recommendations are a great feature on modern shopping websites, allowing you to discover products you might not even know existed. However, this feature can become frustrating and show unwanted recommendations, but there are ways to fix this.

1

Make a fresh start

Online shopping sites incorporate algorithms to refine recommendations and show you the products you might like. These algorithms consider your clicking habits, the products you have opened, or past purchases. With this data, the websites show you the products you like, but sometimes they can be misaligned.

So, the ideal way to avoid irrelevant advice is to create a new account so that the algorithm can start fresh and learn from scratch. But this might not always be possible or something you want to do. However, with some tweaks, you can align the existing algorithm.

2

Refine and Curate Saved Items

Shopping sites like Amazon have wish lists, which are lists of items you’ve saved to view later. Amazon considers this list when recommending products. If you have irrelevant products on your wish list, you are more likely to see similar suggestions. Therefore, you need to remove irrelevant items from your wish list or add items that you want the website to recommend, effectively telling the website what products you like.

For example, if you’re shopping for gadgets and electronics on Amazon, but you’ve also added a skin care product to your wish list, you’ll likely receive skin care product recommendations.

To access your listings on Amazon, you can do the following:

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

2. You will find your wish lists on the left half of the drop down menu.

Now, work through your wish lists and delete any irrelevant or outdated items.

3

Fine-tune the Preferences

Another data point used to recommend products is your viewing history – the products you’ve clicked on in the past and spent time viewing. Amazon and other retailers use your browsing history as an indication of which products you like, and then show you those. To fix this, you need to delete irrelevant items from your history or past purchases.

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

2. Click on Browsing history.

3. Under each item, you will find “remove from view”.

You can also improve your recommendations by:

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

2. Select Recommendations.

3. Click on each product, then Remove this recommendation.

Unfortunately, it is not completely guaranteed to work as new products are often added, but it can help to remove specific items.

4

Interact intentionally or look for things

On websites like Netflix and YouTube, the content you see is heavily influenced by your searches, views, and interactions. When you intentionally interact with posts or movies, the algorithm assumes that you like these elements, so your YouTube recommendations may also show irrelevant results. The same also translates to shopping sites. When you intentionally search for articles or open, you are essentially training the algorithm to recommend similar things.

For example, if I am interested in buying technological gadgets or hardware for my PC setup, I will go to Amazon and start looking for them and interacting with similar items. Over time, the website will recognize this and start recommending technology products. This is exactly what you need to do for the product category you want recommendations for. Also, when buying online, it is better to take it privacy measures to protect yourself from targeted advertisingas websites can track your activity on the Internet and show ads, spoiling the internet experience.

5

Use Separate Accounts for Different Interests

The best approach when you need to buy something unusual, such as gifts or other products outside of your normal purchasing patterns, is to use a separate account. That way, any purchases you make will stay in the secondary account and won’t affect your main account. You can create multiple profiles on Amazon with their respective purchase history, lists and recommendations. That way, everything you do in the second profile stays there. This can help maintain a distinction between off-pattern purchases and effective browsing.