None
Rules to write in advance
Yes
Works alongside recommendations
The content, not the catalogue
What it changes
You almost certainly have tools that react to what a shopper does. Merchandising rules reorder products. Search and recommendations respond to what they typed or viewed. Both work on the catalogue.
Spectare works on the words. It decides which of your content blocks a shopper should read, which is the part those tools leave alone.
Merchandising rules
Rules are written in advance and fire on conditions you predicted. They are good at ordering products and poor at explaining them, and every new campaign adds another rule someone has to remember. Spectare needs no rules written up front: the decision is made per visitor, from the signals in their request.
Recommendations
Recommendations answer what else to show. They do not answer why this one, for this person, which is the question standing between a viewed product and a bought one.
Together
They are not alternatives. Recommendations pick the products, Spectare writes the case for them. If you already have merchandising working, the gap this fills is the copy around it, which is the part nobody has automated because it used to need a writer per audience.
This is one atom from the Spectare content library. Spectare assembles the right atoms for each visitor in real time, based on who they are and how they arrived.