Setting up product recommendations in Shopify
Shopify has a “Recommended products” feature that many users might not know. We will quickly explore how to set this up, our initial impressions and how it compares with Siggy out of the box.
What you need
The easiest way to enable the product recommendation section is to use one of the official themes from Shopify: (Boundless, Brooklyn, Debut, Express, Minimal, Narrative, Simple, Venture).
There are also third-party themes that support product recommendations.
If you are not using any of the two options mentioned above, it will be hard to get the product recommendations to work. To make things more confusing, Shopify came out with “Online Store 2.0” themes in July 2021, and product recommendations will also not work on these newer themes.🤷♂
The Setup
1. Click on “Customize” for your current theme.
2. Drop down to the Products -> Default product template
3. There should be a configuration for “Product recommendations”. Click it and check the “Show dynamic recommendations checkbox”. Save this change.
If all according to plan, you should see product recommendations showing up when you are viewing an individual product:
Tip: From our testing, you will need to create at least one collection (In addition to the home page collection) before the product recommendations are generated.
Customize the product recommendations
Shopify recommends displaying a max of 4 product recommendations at once. It will always present the recommendations by their “relevance”.
However, there are some customizations you can perform on the product-recommendations.liquid template:
For example, sort the recommendations based on the product price:
Original code in the Debut theme
<ul class="grid grid--uniform grid--view-items">
{%- for product in recommendations.products -%}
<li class="grid__item small--one-half medium-up--one-quarter">
{% include 'product-card-grid', max_height: 250, product: product, show_vendor: section.settings.show_vendor %}
</li>
{%- endfor -%}
</ul>Sort the recommendations by product price
{%- assign products = recommendations.products | sort: 'price' | reverse -%}
<ul class="grid grid--uniform grid--view-items">
{%- for product in recommendations.products -%}
<li class="grid__item small--one-half medium-up--one-quarter">
{% include 'product-card-grid', max_height: 250, product: product, show_vendor: section.settings.show_vendor %}
</li>
{%- endfor -%}
</ul>The result will look like this:
You can use these types of customizations to A/B test the effectiveness of the product recommendations.
How does it perform?
We sampled two products from our demo store for a quick sanity test:
Disclaimer: This comes from a demo shop with no order history
Product one: (Watch)
Product two: (Armoire/Dresser)
Interestingly, the recommendations appeared to be mostly the same products with very few variations. We want to emphasize the demo store has no order history. According to Shopify, order history seems to be the primary driver for personalized recommendations.
We did test the recommendations after manually creating 20 orders. It does seem that products from order history start to show up on the recommendation list. However, we will likely need more order history data for the Shopify recommendation engine to better personalize the products shown.
Comparing with Siggy:
Finally, comparing the recommendations generated by Siggy vs. Shopify in the same shop on the earlier products:
Product one: (Watch)
Product two: (Armoire/Dresser)
Siggy’s algorithm generates a more dynamic recommendation list based on product images and descriptions. This capability is only available in the Shopify Plus plan.
Our Takeaway:
You should use Shopify’s product recommendation engine if you have a Shopify Plus account because:
- There is no extra cost to install and purchase any third-party apps.
- You probably have a large amount of order history to make the product recommendations relevant.
- You have the technical resource to implement and customize the recommendations (e.g. You are using a premium/custom theme)
- You have the technical resource to customize product recommendation tracking.
There is a good blog post from Shopify on how to set up the product recommendation section.
