System and method for generating effective recommendations

A data processing system generates recommendations for on-line shopping by scoring recommendations matching the customer's cart contents product page, configuration page, email and/or history using predetermined scoring criteria, such as item availability, item price, relevance of the item to the customer, item clarity, item exposure, total purchase amount in the cart, margin, recommendation confidence and lift, shopper profile matches, seasonality, customer history, time dependency, product marketing emphasis, substitutability, item popularity and/or product attributes associated with the recommended item. The scored recommendations may be ranked and/or filtered to prioritize the recommendations so that the best recommendation is selected for presentation to the customer. In addition, one or more scoring criteria or product attributes for the recommended item may be used to select a specific selling point/message text for inclusion with the selected recommendation.