Let $\mathcal A$ and $\mathcal B$ be commutative and semisimple Banach algebras and let $\theta \in \Delta (\mathcal B)$ . In this paper, we prove that $\mathcal A\times _{\theta }\mathcal B$ is a type I-BSE algebra if and only if ${\mathcal A}_e$ and $\mathcal B$ are so. As a main application of this result, we prove that $\mathcal A\times _{\theta }\mathcal B$ is isomorphic with a $C^*$ -algebra if and only if ${\mathcal A}_e$ and $\mathcal B$ are isomorphic with $C^* $ -algebras. Moreover, we derive related results for the case where $\mathcal A$ is unital.

Associated with two commutative Banach algebras $A$ and $B$ and a character $\theta $ of $B$ is a certain Banach algebra product $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$, which is a splitting extension of $B$ by $A$. We investigate two topics for the algebra $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$ in relation to the corresponding ones of $A$ and $B$. The first one is the Bochner–Schoenberg–Eberlein property and the algebra of Bochner–Schoenberg–Eberlein functions on the spectrum, whereas the second one concerns the wide range of spectral synthesis problems for $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$.