Product recommendations
You can add a section to your product pages that displays an automatically-generated list of product recommendations. Displaying recommended products to customers makes it easier for them to discover new products, and can help to increase online store sales.
Before you add product recommendations to your theme, it's a good idea to get familiar with the following:
To learn how to include recommendations in your theme, refer to Show product recommendations. You can also refer to Dawn's implementation.
Recommendation intents
Anchor link to section titled "Recommendation intents"Tailoring product recommendations across the customer's journey is a powerful way to help customers discover products. Recommendation intents are designed to recommend products using a targeted strategy.
Shopify provides the following types of recommendation intents:
Related recommendations: Offer customers a mix of products that are similar or complementary to a product the customer is interacting with. An example is substitutable products that display in a You may also like section.
Complementary recommendations: Offer customers products that are complementary to a product the customer is interacting with. An example is add-on products that display in a Pair it with section.
Only related recommendations are auto-generated by Shopify. Complementary recommendations need to be manually set up. Recommended products for each intent can be configured via the Shopify Search & Discovery app.
Recommendation logic
Anchor link to section titled "Recommendation logic"The recommendation algorithm predicts the most relevant products based on the product a customer is interacting with. The criteria that the algorithm uses depends on the recommendation intent and a merchant's online store. In general, it might take into account the following factors:
- Purchase history - Finds products that have historically been purchased together.
- Product description - Finds products with similar descriptions.
- Related collections - Finds products from collections that the current product is part of, excluding collections with handles
allandfrontpage.
Recommendation algorithm criteria
Anchor link to section titled "Recommendation algorithm criteria"The criteria that's used depends on a merchant's online store, and the recommendation intent. The following outlines which criteria is used, and when:
| Criteria | Application |
|---|---|
|
Purchase history and Product description |
Merchants with less than 7000 products published to the online store, and an English storefront. |
| Purchase history only | Merchants with less than 7000 products published to the online store, and a non-English storefront. |
| Related collections | All merchants when purchase history and product description recommendations aren't available. |
Merchants can use the Shopify Search & Discovery app to customize product recommendation and search results, which can impact results from storefront search and the Ajax Product Recommendations API. To learn about how these results can be impacted, visit the Shopify Help Center.
UI guidelines
Anchor link to section titled "UI guidelines"The following best practices can help to make sure that you're displaying recommended products in a way that improves the customer experience:
- The recommendation algorithm associates up to ten products per individual product, in order of relevance. For example, the first recommended product is more relevant than the tenth recommended product. For this reason, it's a good idea to limit your recommendations to four products per product page to promote only the most relevant recommendations.
- Make sure that you load the proper image size for the product card.
- Because the recommendations are loaded asynchronously with JavaScript, you might want to add an empty state or not show the recommended products section at all. The placeholder is swapped with the actual recommended products after you load them.
- Use phrases such as “You may also like” for the section header to explain to your customers why you're displaying the recommended products.
Track recommendations
Anchor link to section titled "Track recommendations"To track your product recommendations in Shopify, you need to use the format for product URLs that's specified by the API. To learn more, refer to Tracking conversions for product recommendations.
After you've implemented product recommendations, you can track how effective they are directly from the Analytics page in your Shopify admin. To learn more about product recommendation reports, refer to Product recommendation conversion over time.
Limitations
Anchor link to section titled "Limitations"The following list describes some limitations of the recommendation logic:
- You can't customize the recommendation algorithm to exclude specific products. However, you can choose which of the returned products to show with JavaScript.
- The recommendation algorithm doesn't use orders that have been imported from another store or ecommerce platform to generate product recommendations.
- Products that are out of stock or set to a price of 0, gift cards, and products in the visitor's cart aren't included in recommendations.