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If there's one strategy every e-commerce store should implement for growth, it's product recommendations. Period.
Invesp conducted a survey and found that product recommendations affect every metric you measure - customer retention, conversion rates, AOV, etc. They found that:
- Product recommendations account for just 7 percent of new visits but 26 percent of the total revenue.
- Shoppers who interact with a recommendation are 2X more likely to make a purchase.
- Shoppers who click a recommendation are 4.5X more likely to add those items to the cart.
- 49 percent of shoppers said they purchased a product they did not initially intend to purchase because of a recommendation.
Recommendations work, and your Shopify store needs a product recommendation engine. If you're unsure of how to implement one and the different ways to add recommendations, don't worry, we've got you covered.
We'll first talk about the different types of recommendations you can run on your Shopify store followed by strategies for implementing a recommendation engine.
5 Ways to Add Product Recommendations to A Shopify Store
1. Recommend Best Sellers
Your Shopify store's best-sellers are best sellers for a reason - the product is in high demand among your audience and they are willing to purchase it. It only makes sense to promote these fast-moving products among visitors who have not yet made a purchase.
To achieve this, the product recommendation engine will have to track product sales and then filter out the ones that sell the most for a given period of time (indicating a high frequency of sales as well and not just volume).
You have to then showcase these products on the homepage, product pages, and search results pages.
MyProtein promotes top-selling products on the homepage
2. Recommend Newly Arrived Products
If best-sellers promote well-known and fast-moving products, 'new arrivals' promote products that are recently launched or restocked. These are products that your audience might not be aware are available in the store.
Lack of awareness is one of the top reasons why stores fail to sell products, and this especially happens with new products. Recommending these products via a recommender engine that looks at the date products were uploaded and then promotes recently added products on the homepage, products page, and so on is a great way to generate awareness and get sales on shopify.
Sephora promotes new products under a 'Just Dropped' banner using a recommender engine
3. Show Recommendations Based On Shopping Behavior
While the first two ways to add product recommendations were specific to your store (based on products), this one is specific to the user - based on their viewing history and interactions.
Top e-commerce brands like Amazon upsell and cross-sell products based on shopping behavior. The engine analyzes the products a user views, clicks, reviews, buys, and so on, and then recommends products similar to those. Since the user has shown interest once before, they are likely to do it again.
Recommender engines use collaborative filtering to achieve this, which maps product features to group similar items together and then recommends products a user may be interested in by analyzing products they have already shown an interest in.
LeSportSac recommends user-specific products right on the homepage
4. Recommend Recently Viewed Products
Greeting return visitors with products they viewed during their last visit (but did not purchase) is a great way to get them to pick up from where they left off.
Why is this important? A report by Inc stated that 98 percent of consumers don't make a purchase during their first visit to an e-commerce store. It takes multiple visits before a consumer makes a purchase, especially if they are buying from a new brand or buying a product that is not an essential item (food or medicine).
As you run retargeting campaigns to get shoppers back to your store, it is important to make their journey easier by reducing the effort they need to put in to find products. One way to do that is by recommending products they browsed during their previous visit or products they abandoned in the cart.
The recommender engine achieves this by tracking user interactions and tagging products they interact with.
5. Recommend Products That Are Usually Bought Together
A report by McKinsey stated that 35 percent of Amazon's sales come from product recommendations. One such conversion-driving recommendation segment on Amazon is the 'frequently bought together' section:
Amazon is looking to cross-sell products that go well together by recommending them after a user has entered a product page. To achieve this, the filtering algorithm analyzes the purchase behavior of similar users who bought the same product to find what other products were bought together. These products are then recommended as frequently bought together (or "Customers who bought this also bought").
Another similar segment is 'Products related to this item':
In this case, Amazon is looking to upsell a product or make a suggestion in case the selected product is out of stock by showing products similar to the one the user has chosen. The recommender engine achieves this by mapping product features and grouping similar products together.
How Can You Achieve This On Your Shopify Store?
The advantage of using a platform like Shopify is that it has a large and extensive app store. You are bound to find free and premium plug-and-play recommender engines on the Shopify store. Some of the top purchased and rated ones are:
- ReConvert Upsell & Cross-Sell by ReConvert - Helps you set up upsell and cross recommendations along with post-purchase funnels.
- Personalized Recommendations by Glood.AI - This is a great all-in-one app that allows you to display upsells, cross-sells, recently viewed products, trending products, recently launched products, and so on.
- Also Bought • Related products by Code Black Belt - A great solution to add the 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought' segment to your Shopify store.
You might notice one issue with this approach though - each app delivers different recommendation features and you may need to use more than one to implement all the recommendation strategies that you intend to. Using a third-party product recommendation engine that plugs into Shopify is a better option instead.
Argoid's recommender engine for Shopify, for example, is built to give you all the features and functionality a Shopify store needs from one single solution. This allows you to deliver Amazon-like recommendations and increase your sales, using just one plugin. If you're looking to see how it works, drop a message to get a demo of the product.