A Must-Read for Shopify Beginners: Complete Guide to Using Also Bought

Also Bought is a Shopify app for cross-selling. In this article, we'll walk you through how to set up the Also Bought app and how to adjust its recommendation logic and display settings.

We've previously written that upselling tends to have a greater impact on revenue than cross-selling (Leveraging Psychology? Effective Upselling with Shopify Apps), but when you carry a large product catalog, cross-selling can be highly effective as well. Make the most of it.

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Recommendation Explorer

The Recommendation Explorer is the first screen you see when you open the app. It lets you check which recommendation logic is currently applied to each product. Refer to it as needed.

Manual Recommendation

With Manual Recommendation, you can manually specify which products to recommend for each item. Select a target product and decide which products to recommend alongside it.

Until enough purchase data has accumulated, manual recommendations play an important role. Use this feature during initial setup in combination with the Global Recommendations covered later in this article.

Recommendation Tuning

Recommendation Tuning lets you fine-tune recommendation logic for cases that automatic recommendations alone can't cover.

First, you can choose which recommendation logic to use.

Automatic recommendations are based on purchase data. Global recommendations are products you want to promote across your entire store. Random recommendations are, as the name suggests, randomized.

With Random recommendations, you can configure the scope of randomization. You can choose from fully random, random within a manually selected collection, random within a product type, or random within a vendor.

You can set the maximum number of products to display in the recommendation widget.

Enabling the Shuffle recommendations option shuffles the default order of recommendations. In other words, the most relevant product won't always appear first, helping keep the experience feeling fresh.

If the same products keep getting recommended and purchased, your recommendations stop introducing customers to new items. To prevent this from happening, consider using Shuffle recommendations when you notice purchase patterns becoming too concentrated on certain products.

Global recommendations

Here you can select the products you want to recommend across your entire store.

Products excluded

You can select products to exclude from recommendations. This is useful for items that don't need to appear in the recommendation widget — for example, optional add-on services intended for upselling.

Widgets disabled

You can select specific products for which the recommendation widget will not be displayed.

When analyzing with tools like Hotjar, you may find cases where showing recommendations actually causes visitors to hesitate and not complete a purchase. For those products, it's a good idea to hide the widget.

Widget location

Configure where the recommendation widget appears. Settings can be configured separately for the product page and the cart page.

On the product page, you can choose from three placement options. Simply selecting a location will display the widget there — no coding required.

You can also specify a custom location using a CSS class selector.

On the cart page, you can choose from two placement options. Just like the product page, simply selecting a location will display the recommendation widget there.

For the cart page as well, you can specify the display location using a CSS class selector.

Visual preferences

You can customize the appearance of the widget. Select the element you'd like to adjust.

Configure the height, color, and other properties of each element directly in the admin panel. You can also hide elements you don't want to display.

Advanced preferences

Under "Redirect policy after adding products to the shopping cart," you can choose what happens after a customer clicks the Add to Cart button.

You can select from four options: stay on the product page, follow the theme's default behavior, redirect to the cart page, or redirect to the checkout page.

You can also configure settings such as whether to display prices, loading timing, and an auto-adjustment feature when your theme is updated.

Statistics

You can review your recommendation performance with data. It's also possible to check whether any orders were placed through recommendations.

Maximizing Recommendation Performance with StoreHero

StoreHero helps Shopify merchants who are looking to grow their sales by executing growth initiatives with thoroughness and precision.

When it comes to recommendation management, we leverage our growth platform StoreHero to utilize performance and inventory data for each product and SKU. This allows us to run multiple recommendation logics simultaneously — such as products frequently purchased together, products under consideration, and items to prioritize in sales — enabling the kind of granular operations and high-volume initiative execution that manual management simply cannot achieve, and supporting merchants in achieving continuous growth.

We are currently offering free store diagnostic sessions. If you have challenges with recommendation management or growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Learn more about our free store diagnostic

Summary

Also Bought is an app that makes cross-selling straightforward and easy. It's popular worldwide because it's simple to install and allows you to fine-tune recommendation logic based on real data.

If you're running a Shopify store with a large product catalog, give it a try.

StoreHero can support you with all aspects of Shopify growth, including making the most of Also Bought. Feel free to reach out. =>View StoreHero's service overview