Are you looking for the best product recommendation strategies to try on your Shopify site to improve conversions and sales? This post is for you.
Product recommendation is one effective method to uplift your sales without spending much on ads. It involves suggesting products prospects will like based on their purchase history, preferences, demographics, etc.
Product recommendation should never be an afterthought. The reason is that studies have shown product recommendations account for 31% of e-commerce sales. You’d be leaving a lot of money on the table if you aren’t implementing a smart product recommendation strategy on your site.
Thankfully, implementing product recommendations on Shopify isn’t rocket science. You just need the right product recommendation strategies – and, of course, the right set of tools.
In this post, we will share foolproof product recommendation strategies guaranteed to boost your sales. But first, what really is product recommendation and what are the benefits?
What Are Product Recommendations?
Product recommendations, or Shopify recommendations in this context, are exactly what the name says: recommending products to potential customers. Not just any product but products they will like to buy.
For instance, if you run a clothing store online, one good product recommendation strategy to try is suggesting, say, gowns to women and t-shirts to men.
Another form of products recommendations is suggesting a laptop bag to a customer who recently purchased a laptop from your store.
In fact, we are willing to bet you’ve seen product recommendations a couple of times online. Here’s an example from Amazon.
Product recommendations can also take the form of upsells and cross-sells.
For example, if you sell beach wears online, you can cross-sell a customer that bought a beach hat by suggesting a sunshade.
One vital key to finding success with product recommendations is understanding your target audience – and segmenting them accordingly. Details in a bit.
Benefits of Product Recommendations
Implementing personalized product recommendations on Shopify costs time and money. This then begs the question: is it worth it? It is, actually. Here are some reasons why.
1. Uplifts Average Order Value (AOV)
You don’t necessarily need more customers to increase your sales – you just need a way to make the few customers spend more each time they shop from your store. This is what Average Order Value (AOV) is all about.
AOV is a metric that measures the average amount shoppers spend each time to make a purchase from your store.
By using the right product recommendation strategy, you can boost your AOV by making shoppers buy more than what they intended. This, in turn, leads to more sales.
2. Reduces Bounce Rate
Implementing product recommendations can go a long way in reducing your website bounce rate. The reason is that when potential customers don’t find the products they are looking for quickly, they can exit your website quickly.
But by suggesting relevant products to them, they will stay longer and possibly make a purchase, hence lowering your site’s bounce rate.
3. Creates Personalized Shopping Experience
Modern-day online shoppers are increasingly wanting a personalized shopping experience.
And what better way to personalize your shoppers’ experience than by recommending relevant products that match their tastes and demographics?
4. Improves Customer Loyalty and Retention
When you suggest relevant products to your customers, their buying journey will become smoother and sweeter. As such, they will give you their loyalty and always return back to your store. This means better retention and ultimately more sales.
5. Improves Conversion
If you’ve been struggling to convert your website visitors into customers, you might have to try out product recommendations.
By making it easy for prospects to find products they will likely want to buy, you’d increase the chances of them making a purchase, thus improving your website’s conversion rate.
And you know, the more your website converts, the higher it will rank on Google – and other search engines.
Product Recommendation Strategies for Shopify
Now you’ve seen what product recommendation is all about and the benefits it has to offer, it’s about time we discussed the strategies to use. Here are 8 strategies to try.
1. New Arrivals Recommendation
This is probably the easiest and most popular form of product recommendation. It involves displaying newly added products on your site to entice prospects. We bet you’ve seen it a couple of times on other sites.
Here’s one from Best Buy.
What makes the New Arrival product recommendation strategy so effective? Firstly, it plays on our natural human instinct of wanting new stuff.
Remember how excited you were when you newly bought your phone? Or when you bought your new car?
The thing is, buying new stuff naturally gets us excited. So by throwing new products in the face of shoppers, you’d be stirring excitement in them.
Secondly, the New Arrivals recommendation is a good way to stir up the fear of missing out, or FOMO for short.
This kind of fear pushes people into buying things – sometimes without having the intention to – just because they fear they might lose out on a good deal.
2. Frequently Bought Together
Frequently bought together is another type of recommendation that is easy to implement and works pretty well. As the name suggests, it involves recommending complementary products other shoppers bought to prospects.
It looks something like this:
Frequently bought together is a form of cross-selling. Essentially, you are trying to convince customers to buy products that closely match the one they are looking to buy. By doing so, you get them to spend more than they probably intended and uplift your sales.
3. Recently Viewed
Showing prospects products they viewed but didn’t buy can make them have a rethink. It could be that they got distracted and forgot about the product they were perusing. Could also be that they didn’t have the money then – the reasons are endless.
Retargeting prospects with products they viewed but didn’t buy can uplift your sales immensely.
4. Trending Products
Suggesting trending products to prospects is another product recommendation strategy you can try on Shopify. By trending, we mean products a lot of other customers have been buying – or showing interest in.
Like the New Arrival form of recommendation, trending products is also effective at stirring up FOMO and excitement in shoppers.
Better yet, you can suggest best-selling products. You could even spruce things up by recommending best-selling products for a category. Here’s how Amazon does it:
5. Inspired by Your Browsing History
If someone has been looking through a product category, there is a good chance that they will eventually make a purchase with a little nudging.
For example, let’s say you sell hats online and noticed someone has been checking out your beach hat products but never bought a thing. The prospect then leaves your site and returns later. Showing them your beach hat collection based on their browsing history can push them to make a purchase.
Amazon is very good at this. Here’s one on their site:
6. Free Shipping Recommendation
Online shoppers love free shipping. In fact, offering free shipping to customers can be a major game-changer for your business. Studies suggest that as many as 80% of online shoppers expect free shipping from vendors.
However, offering free shipping on every sale isn’t practical – you might run your business aground.
As such, it’s best to offer free shipping on selected products – and then recommend those products to shoppers. You’d be surprised at the massive sales this rather simple recommendation strategy would generate.
Even better, you can use a free shipping bar for this kind of promotion, as it will help get more eyeballs to your free shipping offers.
7. You May Also Like Upsells
The most engaged set of shoppers you should always go after are those that recently bought a product from your store. These shoppers are most likely to buy another product with a gentle nudge.
And the best way to nudge them is by upselling them. By upselling, we mean getting them to buy a product slightly pricier than the one they just bought.
8. Abandoned Cart Recommendations
Showing prospects the products they added to their carts but didn’t buy is another effective form of product recommendation. You can display these products when they are about to exit your website using an exit-intent popup. You can also display them when they visit your site for the second time.
This type of recommendation will pack more punch if you use a discount to entice prospects.
For example, you can offer them a 15% discount if they complete their unfinished carts. But if they still don’t, try capturing their emails and then continue the persuasion in their inboxes.
Where Should You Display Recommendations?
No matter how well thought out your product recommendation strategies are, they won’t yield your desired results if you display them in the wrong place. The question then is, where should you display recommendations to drive the most conversions and sales?
Here are a few:
1. Homepage
Your homepage is probably one of the most visited pages on your website. If you doubt us, check Google Console.
So it definitely makes a lot of sense to display product recommendations there. Doing so ensures your recommendations campaign gets a lot of eyeballs, thus increasing your chances of making sales.
2. Product Page
Your product pages are another excellent place to display recommendations.
Implementing product recommendations on your product page increases the likelihood of conversion by several folds. Consider implementing it on your product category pages, too.
3. Cart Page
If a prospect has finally arrived on your cart page, it means they are ready to checkout. Yes, things could go awry and they leave, but at least they’ve gotten to the bottom of your sales funnel and are ready to enter their credit card details.
As such, enticing them to buy a complementary product based on their purchase history and preferences will likely lead to a fruitful outcome.
Using enticements like discounts and free shipping will come in handy here.
4. Checkout Page
The checkout page is where a prospect’s buying journey ends. This is where they eventually pay for the product in their cart.
Just before they hit the checkout button, you might want to try getting them to buy an extra product by displaying a personalized product suggestion. You’d be surprised at how insanely effective this approach can be.
Best Product Recommendation Apps for Shopify
How do you even set up a product recommendation campaign on Shopify? Definitely not by coding because that would be downright impractical.
Using a third-party recommendation solution like Barilliance is a viable option, only it can leave big holes in your pockets. For this reason, you are better off using a product recommendation Shopify app.
Here are a few of the popular ones to try:
1. Adoric
Adoric helps you maximize conversions and profit on your Shopify store. Its AI-powered product recommendation engine allows you to upsell and cross-sell products on your Shopify store via popups.
With Adoric’s dynamic popups, you can display product recommendations anywhere you want on your Shopify store – whether it’s the product page, cart page, or checkout page.
If you’re concerned that popups can disrupt your customers’ shopping experience, you have nothing to worry about. The Adoric Shopify App is intuitive and lets you set targeting and trigger options to upsell and cross-sell to your shoppers at the right time without affecting their experience.
Adoric is fitting if you’re looking to improve customer experience, skyrocket conversion rate, boost product discoverability, increase average order value (AOV), or just sell more.
2. Rebuy Personalization
And so we kick things off with the Rebuy Personalization app for Shopify. This app enables you to give your customers a memorable, personalized shopping experience by creating merchandising rules across your pages. And you can customize these rules however you wish.
With the Rebuy app, you can create upsell and cross-sell merchandising rules which you can add to your homepage, cart page, and checkout page to attract more sales and uplift your revenue.
On top of that, it makes it easy for you to create post-purchase offers, re-order landing pages, and smart links. It also supports end-to-end personalization and integrates seamlessly with most marketing apps for Shopify.
3. Wiser
Wiser is undoubtedly one of the most popular product recommendation apps on the Shopify app store. This app makes it easy to create stunning personalized recommendations that attract attention and drive sales.
Moreover, Wiser comes with a built-in AI that lets you create smart recommendations, such as frequently bought together and related product recommendations. In addition, it lets you create upsell offers with a few clicks of a button.
It also comes with an analytics tool that lets you see how your recommendation campaigns are performing.
4. Zoorix: Cross-sell & Bundles
Zoorix Cross-Sell & Bundles does exactly what the name suggests: helps you create recommendations in the form of Cross-sell bundles.
It comes with a built-in AI tool that is capable of automatically creating smart upsell offers for you. And not just cross-sells but upsells too.
On top of that, with Zoorix, you can create multiple upsell offer types and mix them however you want. It also allows you to create discounts based on volume quantity and quantity breaks.
And as for pricing, you can start using this app for free and then upgrade to the paid versions as your business starts to expand.
5. Frequently Bought Together
Looking for an app that lets you create compelling frequently-bought-together recommendations easily and quickly? Frequently Bought Together is just the app you need.
With this app, you can create “related products” recommendations to get customers to spend more in your store. You can also use it to create different enticing discount offers to attract prospects to your upsell offers.
Furthermore, it enables you to automate product recommendations by leveraging its built-in AI tool.
Conclusion
Done well, product recommendations can uplift your business to levels you never thought possible. And with the strategies and apps we’ve shared in this post, your chances of succeeding are high.
Are you getting a lot of traffic to your website but have little to no sales to show for it? Adoric can help.
Adoric comes with a suite of tools and features designed to help you convert your website visitors into customers. These tools are super easy to use and you can get up and running with them quickly.
Add Adoric to your Shopify website right away to put it to the test.
