{"ID":2875662,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02890","arxiv_id":"2509.02890","title":"Grocery to General Merchandise: A Cross-Pollination Recommender using LLMs and Real-Time Cart Context","abstract":"Modern e-commerce platforms strive to enhance customer experience by providing timely and contextually relevant recommendations. However, recommending general merchandise to customers focused on grocery shopping -- such as pairing milk with a milk frother -- remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. This paper introduces a cross-pollination (XP) framework, a novel approach that bridges grocery and general merchandise cross-category recommendations by leveraging multi-source product associations and real-time cart context. Our solution employs a two-stage framework: (1) A candidate generation mechanism that uses co-purchase market basket analysis and LLM-based approach to identify novel item-item associations; and (2) a transformer-based ranker that leverages the real-time sequential cart context and optimizes for engagement signals such as add-to-carts. Offline analysis and online A/B tests show an increase of 36\\% add-to-cart rate with LLM-based retrieval on the item page, and 15\\% lift in add-to-cart using cart context-based ranker on the cart page. Our work contributes practical techniques for cross-category recommendations and broader insights for e-commerce systems.","short_abstract":"Modern e-commerce platforms strive to enhance customer experience by providing timely and contextually relevant recommendations. However, recommending general merchandise to customers focused on grocery shopping -- such as pairing milk with a milk frother -- remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. This paper i...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02890","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02890v2","authors":"[\"Akshay Kekuda\",\"Murali Mohana Krishna Dandu\",\"Rimita Lahiri\",\"Shiqin Cai\",\"Sinduja Subramaniam\",\"Evren Korpeoglu\",\"Kannan Achan\"]","published":"2025-09-02T23:28:34Z","proceeding":"cs.IR","tasks":"[\"cs.IR\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Transformer\",\"Large Language Model\"]","has_code":false}