AI Product Recommendations in Magento: Adobe Sensei vs Custom OpenAI Embeddings
Adobe Sensei Product Recommendations ships only with Adobe Commerce: Magento Open Source merchants do not get it. The alternative is rolling your own with OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small, a vector store (pgvector or OpenSearch k-NN), and a 60-line PDP block. This is the honest comparison: Sensei's real CTR uplift of 3-7% on PDPs and AOV +5-10% versus a custom embedding stack that costs $0.02 per 1,000 products to embed, $5/month for a Redis cache, and gives you full ranking transparency. Includes the cold-start playbook (category-centroid embeddings until behavioural signals arrive), the pgvector schema, the OpenAI batch call, and the break-even math: at 100,000 monthly sessions, Sensei needs 0.4% incremental revenue to pay for itself; the custom stack needs 0.04%.
