Customize product recommendations

Some themes have recommended products sections that display complementary and related products to customers on your product pages. These recommendations can be customized using the Shopify Search & Discovery app.

For product recommendations to display on your store, you need to use a theme that includes a complementary products section and product recommendations section, and then add that section to your product pages.

Product recommendation requirements

A recommended product displays on the product page only if the following criteria are met:

  • It isn't sold out.
  • It has a price higher than $0.00.
  • It isn't a gift card.
  • It is published to your Online Store sales channel.
  • It isn't currently in the visitor's cart.

These requirements help that customers discover and purchase currently available products.

Complementary Products

Complementary products are products often bought in addition to a selected product . You can display complementary products to help customers discover new products and increase your online store sales.

Best practices for complementary product recommendations

Recommending relevant products can lead to more sales or larger cart sizes. Use the following best practices to choose complementary product recommendations:

  • Choose product recommendations that you are confident customers will find useful.
  • Choose products that would be considered a good add-on to the original product.
  • Choose products that are lower or equivalent in cost to the original product.

Related products are products that are similar to a selected product. You can display potential substitutes to help customers discover other similar products they might like.

The products that you recommend can increase the chance that a customer will find relevant products, which can lead to increased sales. Consider the following best practices when designing a product recommendation strategy for your online store:

  • Choose product recommendations that you are confident customers will find useful.
  • Allow automatically generated product recommendations to display with your custom recommendations, because the automatically generated recommendations adjust to reflect changes to your products and customer activity. This will also make sure recommendations are displayed when your custom product recommendations are sold out or unpublished.
  • Be sure that your theme settings are displaying the amount of product recommendations you want.

Automatically generated product recommendations

Related product recommendations are automatically generated for each product in your store. When you're customizing recommendations for a product in the Search & Discovery app, you can see a preview of the generated recommendations.

Shopify has built-in strategies to adjust these product recommendations based on products that are commonly purchased together, have a similar product description, or products in related collections. Each strategy has its own requirements in order to be used:

  • Purchase history: The product needs previous sales to assess buying behavior.
  • Product description: Only available to merchants with an English storefront.
  • Related collections: Used when recommendations based on purchase history and product descriptions aren't available.

It's not possible to edit the generated product recommendations, but you can add your own recommendations manually.

The generated recommendations for a product change frequently. It is common to have different recommendations when you revisit a product page as Shopify suggests new products that might be more relevant to shoppers. The product recommendations previewed in the Search & Discovery app will often be different than storefront for this reason.

Adjusting combined listings in recommendations

You can choose how combined listings display in auto-generated recommendations in the Settings section of the Shopify Search and Discovery app. By default, only child products are displayed. However, you can update the app settings to display parent products only, or both parent and child products.

To have access to this setting, your store must contain combined listing products, or have the Combined Listings app installed.

Steps:

  1. In the Shopify Search & Discovery app, click Settings.
  2. In the Products section, select one of the following options for auto-generated product recommendations for combined listings:
    • Click Only show child products to display only the child products of combined listings.
    • Click Only show parent products to display only the parent products of combined listings.
    • Click Show both to display both the parent and child products of combined listings.
  3. Click Save.

Create product recommendations

Customize product recommendations that display on your product page.

Steps:

  1. In the Shopify Search & Discovery app, click Product recommendations, and then click Add recommendations.
  2. Select a product that you want to customize product recommendations for.
  3. Select up to 10 Complementary products.
  4. Select up to 10 Related products to recommend. Set the product to display only the custom recommendations or to display both custom recommendations and automatically generated recommendations.
  5. Click Save.

Edit product recommendations in bulk with metafields

You can use metafields to edit product recommendations.

Steps:

  1. In the Search and Discovery app, select multiple products from the Recommendations page.
  2. Click Bulk edit to open the Bulk Editor.
  3. Choose product recommendations for each product and click Save.

You can also edit metafields from other apps, like Shopify Flow.

Edits to the following Shopify standard metafields will change the product recommendations shown to visitors to your online store. The changes that you make to the metafields are synced with the Search & Discovery app.

NameDescription
Related products

A list of related products recommendations manually chosen by the merchant. This does not include recommendations generated by Shopify.

Related products settings

Controls how selected product recommendations are displayed. Accepted values:

  • only manual: display only selected recommendations
  • ahead: display selected products ahead of auto-generated product recommendations
Complementary products

A list of complementary product recommendations manually chosen by the merchant.

Can’t find the answers you’re looking for? We’re here to help.