7 reasons why Product Recommendations beat Related Products on Shopify
According to Shopify Nation, recommendations account for 10–30% of eCommerce revenues, so it’s important to have them on your store.
Lots of Shopify themes include built-in Related Products functionality to help you with cross-selling. Although that can be a useful start, it’s nowhere near as powerful as sales-based product recommendations.
What are Related Products?
The basic Related Products that you get in many Shopify Themes shows up on Product Pages, and simply shows you other products from the same collection, as described here by Out Of The Sandbox.
This can be pretty powerful for co-ordinating items — for example, a top that matches the skirt, if your store shows collections based on, say, designer or brand. But in many circumstances it simply doesn’t help increase the basket size. By using a recommendations app in your Shopify store you can show your customer other items that people tend to by with this item, rather than instead of it.
Better Recommendations is, well, Better!
Here are some of the key advantages of an app like Better Recommendations over the basic Related Products support.
1. Recommendations based on real sales
We use your store’s purchase history and a machine-learning algorithm to work out which products are most likely to be bought together. Recommendations are constantly improving and adapting according to recent sales, so if you have seasonal products or a changing catalog, our product recommendations will stay up-to-date.
2. Manual recommendations
One of the most requested features when we first introduced Better Recommendations was the ability to override automated recommendations with manual choices for each product.
3. Recommendations don’t need collections
Our recommendations algorithm can include all products in your store (although you can control this and exclude some items if you like). That means less admin for you, and more importantly you can
4. Cart / basket recommendations as standard
The basic Related Products support only gives you product suggestions on the product page. With Better Recommendations you can also show product suggestions on the cart page. This is great for those additional items (“Did you forget?”) like batteries, carry cases or accessories that people often add to their order at the last minute.
5. Turn errors into sales
We also include a widget showing the best-selling items on the store. You can use this on your home page, articles, or even on the ‘404’ error page that is shown if someone mis-types a link on your site.
6. Add recommendations to your blog
If you use the Shopify blog feature it’s easy to add appropriate product recommendations to your articles too.
7. Bonus — Recently Viewed items
We include a Recently Viewed items widget in Better Recommendations. Each customer can see the products they’ve just been looking at, all styled beautifully to match your store.
If you’ve got a Shopify store, try our five-star-rated product recommendations app, Better Recommendations. Our free trial gives you as long as you like to get recommendations looking just how you want them, and then another 14 days free to see how much extra revenue the app generates on your store. Try it today!
