Tips for Getting Better Performance from Shopify Product Recommendations
Here are some configuration tips to help you get better performance when implementing product recommendations on Shopify. While product recommendations often bring to mind on-site widgets, we'll also cover how to leverage product recommendations in emails and ads.
Whether you're just getting started with product recommendations or looking to improve their performance, this article has something for you—so be sure to read on.
StoreHero uses its proprietary growth platform to support detailed operations that manual workflows can't handle, and to drive business growth through large-scale campaign execution. If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service overview here
Recommendations at the Bottom of Product Pages
Displaying related products or frequently bought-together items at the bottom of product pages increases page exploration and improves CVR (Conversion Rate). However, the default recommendations built into themes are not always accurate.
If accuracy is lacking, we recommend using apps such as Also Bought or Glood Product Recommendations, or customizing your theme to implement recommendation logic. When customizing your theme, you can manage recommendation rules using product tags or metafields.
Recommendations at the Time of Cart Addition
Showing recommendations when a customer clicks the Add to Cart button on a product page makes upselling and cross-selling more effective. Apps that implement this feature include Candy Rack, Bold Upsell, Zoorix Bundle Kit & Cross Sell, and Selleasy.
Candy Rack and Bold Upsell trigger a popup like the one below at the moment the Add to Cart button is clicked, encouraging additional purchases. Proposing complementary products immediately after cart addition leads to high cross-sell and upsell success rates.
Zoorix and Selleasy, on the other hand, are apps that enable bundle purchasing directly below the cart button. These tend to perform well for cross-selling through bundled offers.
Bold Upsell, Zoorix, and Selleasy also allow you to set recommended products at the collection level. By creating dedicated recommendation collections and managing them effectively, you can improve cross-sell and upsell success rates and use the recommendation slot to move products with long remaining inventory days.
Recommendations in Email
Product recommendations are also effective in email. For stores where popular products change frequently—such as apparel or lifestyle goods—manually updating recommended products in automated emails on an ongoing basis can be a real burden.
With the CRM app Klaviyo, you can sync product data from Shopify to populate recommended products within your emails. All you need to do is create a Shopify collection of the products you want to recommend. Whenever the collection is updated on the Shopify side, the recommended products in your Klaviyo emails will update automatically.
Creating collections like the ones below and configuring Klaviyo to automatically send them to the right customer segments will drive strong results:
- Products popular among first-time buyers
- Products popular among second-time buyers
- Products you want to move quickly due to inventory
- Products most commonly purchased after a customer's previous purchase
Manually maintaining collection classifications is time-consuming, so at StoreHero, we automate collection updates based on aggregated data.
Recommendations in Ads
Google Shopping Ads and Meta catalog ads deliver products using each platform's algorithm, but when conversion data is insufficient, or when you want to surface products that have suddenly surged in popularity or ones you want to prioritize, customizing your product feed is an effective approach.
Both Google Ads and Meta Ads include a field called custom labels in their catalog data, which can be used for product grouping. By assigning custom labels based on product characteristics—such as high-margin products, sale items, or priority products—you can group listing groups and product sets by custom label and serve different products per ad campaign.
Custom labels can be set at the variant level. In apparel and similar categories, popularity can vary significantly by color even for the same product, so in those cases, custom labels should be set per variant.
For Google Ads, connecting through the Google & YouTube sales channel syncs Shopify product data with Google Ads custom labels. However, the Facebook & Instagram integration between Shopify and Meta does not support syncing data to Meta Ads custom labels. If you want to surface recommended or popular products in Meta Ads, you'll need to use a feed customization app (such as Multifeed Google Shopping Feed) and create a dedicated product set for recommendations within Meta's catalog.
Since manually applying labels is time-consuming, StoreHero automates the process of updating custom labels based on predefined rules.
Measuring & Tuning Recommendation Performance
Don't just set your recommendations and forget them—monitor whether they're actually contributing to revenue.
For on-site and email recommendations, tracking click counts, click-through rates, CVR, and revenue over time will give you a clear picture of recommendation performance. For on-site recommendations, send click events to GA4 to measure clicks and post-click CVR and revenue. If CVR and revenue metrics are hard to interpret, you can also look at the number of views of similar products within the same session.
For ads, keep an eye on impressions, clicks, click-through rate, revenue, CVR, and ROAS for the relevant campaigns.
Executing Recommendation Operations at Scale with StoreHero
StoreHero supports Shopify merchants looking to grow their sales by helping them execute growth strategies thoroughly and at scale.
For recommendation operations, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to utilize performance and inventory data at the product and SKU level—running multiple recommendation logics simultaneously, such as frequently co-purchased products, products under active consideration, and items to prioritize for sales. This enables granular operations and large-scale campaign execution that would be impossible to manage manually, driving sustained growth for our merchants.
We're currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with recommendation operations or growth strategies in general, please get in touch. Learn more about our free store diagnosis
Summary
We've introduced configuration tips to improve the performance of product recommendations on Shopify with just a few adjustments.
Beyond the recommendation strategies covered here, StoreHero helps merchants build a system for continuous growth by automating and streamlining the entire sales process—including customer acquisition through ads and social media, Shopify store optimization, and inventory management.
If you're interested in tackling Shopify growth together with StoreHero, feel free to reach out.