I worked with a team that built an engine that did exactly this. There are complex issues to resolve. Mostly, the market for retail analytics is very small so even though this type of data fabric can offer retailers incredible insights into what they should be purchasing and how to bundle/market their products together, they won't pay what it costs to scrape such much data to generate the recommendations.
The product recommendation angle for eCommerce is a better angle but only works well for big companies where you have enough data at the onset to drive better recommendations. With smaller companies and lesser known products you must make probabilistic determinations based on image analysis and context structure that will be mostly guess work until you have real data. Such as you surmised with your A/B testing.
Anyway, it seems you already got some major clients under your belt and have proven a track record. Hope you are able to succeed in your quest to make better recommendations work for small business with the data fabric you created.
Happy to chat through my experiences if you have interest. hn (at) strapr (dot) com is my email.
The product recommendation angle for eCommerce is a better angle but only works well for big companies where you have enough data at the onset to drive better recommendations. With smaller companies and lesser known products you must make probabilistic determinations based on image analysis and context structure that will be mostly guess work until you have real data. Such as you surmised with your A/B testing.
Anyway, it seems you already got some major clients under your belt and have proven a track record. Hope you are able to succeed in your quest to make better recommendations work for small business with the data fabric you created.
Happy to chat through my experiences if you have interest. hn (at) strapr (dot) com is my email.