Want to succeed in ecommerce? Here’s a shortcut — provide personalized product recommendations.
This has proven to be one of the most effective techniques for improving conversion rates and generating more revenue. Below, we’ll show you exactly how to implement this feature, and we’ll go over some of the best examples for inspiration as well.
Your customers aren’t fungible. They have different backgrounds, lifestyles, preferences, income levels, etc. So, why would you recommend the same products to everyone?
By personalizing your product recommendations instead, you’ll make it much more likely that each customer is actually interested in what they see, leading to more sales for your store.
You certainly don’t have to take our word for it — 90% of marketers believe personalization contributes to profitability, and 76% of consumers say that personalization increases the odds that they will make a purchase.
Top ecommerce brands have had success adding personalized product recommendations to many areas of their store, including:
To give you a better idea of how you can include personalized product recommendations on your own store, let’s take a look at eleven examples of how live ecommerce websites are currently using this feature:
Background: We don’t really have to explain this one — as the fifth-largest company in the world by market cap, Amazon is perhaps the biggest success story in the history of ecommerce.
Highlights: Amazon’s homepage is littered with personalized product recommendations. There are separate sections for “Buy again”, “Related to items you’ve viewed”, “Inspired by your shopping trends”, “Similar to your past purchases”, “Gift ideas inspired by your shopping history”, etc. Maintaining a high level of personalization has always been a priority for Amazon, and it’s a big reason why they’re now so popular.
Action items: As mentioned above, personalized product recommendations are such an effective marketing technique that they’re almost always worth a spot on your homepage. If it’s good enough for Amazon, that’s a sign you should consider doing it as well.
Background: LL Bean sells clothing and outdoor recreation equipment, such as coats, jackets, boots, backpacks, and fishing gear.
Highlights: Like Amazon, LL Bean features personalized product recommendations on their homepage with their “Recommended for You” section.
Action items: LL Bean shows how you don’t need to be as in-your-face as Amazon with the product recommendations on your homepage. By using just a single section for this purpose, you’ll be able to realize the benefits of personalized product recommendations without adding too much clutter.
Background: This brand sells ready-to-assemble Swedish furniture as well as home accessories, kitchen appliances, and similar goods.
Highlights: Each of the category pages on Ikea’s website (storage & organization, furniture, lighting, etc.) has a “Recommended for you” section. This section also notes which of the items are best sellers, giving visitors an additional reason to click through to the product page and investigate further — after all, if all these other people have purchased the product, there must be something valuable about it that they might appreciate as well.
Action items: Have you added personalized product recommendations to the category pages on your store? If not, you should strongly consider doing so. And noting which items are best sellers is also a good idea.
Background: Clarks is a British footwear manufacturer.
Highlights: You’ll find that the Clarks website has a “We Think You May Like” section featured at the bottom of every product page. It’s also worth noting that Clarks has added a hover effect to the images in this section, showing visitors what their shoes look like when they are actually in use.
Action items: Clarks offers a good example of how to incorporate recommendations on a product page — recommendations are from the most important information for this type of page (that would be details such as the price, specs, customer ratings, etc. for the specific product you’re selling), so they shouldn’t be featured too close to the top. Also, depending on what type of product you sell, adding a similar hover effect to your product recommendations section may allow you to provide useful visual information that increases your odds of making the sale.
Background: The first company to manufacture blue jeans, Levi’s is one of the most iconic brands in the fashion industry.
Highlights: The product pages on the Levi’s website have a “Styles You May Like” section. Like a lot of fashion brands, Levi’s has a large catalog — this type of product recommendations section helps visitors find items that they might want to buy, even if that turns out not to be the case for the particular product they’re currently viewing.
Action items: If you also belong to the fashion industry or sell a lot of items in some other type of ecommerce niche, you can employ this strategy on your store to help customers discover options that they might not have otherwise been aware of.
Background: This home improvement supplies store is one of the top companies not just ecommerce, but any industry — in terms of the size of its workforce, Home Depot is among the biggest employers in the United States.
Highlights: On its checkout page, Home Depot recommends other products from the same brands that customers have already added to their cart.
Action items: If you resell products from other brands on your storefront, then it’s certainly worth keeping track of which customers have purchased each brand. Once a brand has earned someone’s trust, there’s a good chance that they’ll return to the same brand for future purchases. You can use this information to make your product recommendations significantly more effective.
Background: In addition to its high-end outdoor recreation clothing and equipment, Patagonia is notable for its environmental activism (1% of all sales revenue is dedicated to this cause).
Highlights: Patagonia’s checkout page features a “Goes Great With” section, showcasing items the visitor may want to purchase based on what’s already in their cart.
Action items: Again, promoting complementary products is an excellent way to increase your average order value.
Background: This company specializes in leather bags, wallets, and briefcases for women.
Highlights: Bukvy Bag displays items that the visitor has recently viewed at the bottom of their online shopping cart.
Action items: This example reveals yet another way that you can use your checkout page to keep making more sales. If a customer viewed an item but didn’t add it to their cart, they may have simply forgotten to do so — in that case, a simple reminder might be all it takes to get them to follow through with the purchase.
Background: This UK-based arts and crafts retail chain sells items such as fabric, stationary, yarn, dyes, sewing kits, and painting supplies.
Highlights: In the “Craft Ideas” section of their site, Hobbycraft offers thousands of helpful guides, covering topics such as “48 Projects to Make This Christmas” and “How to Make a Fabric Storage Box”. Hobbycraft then highlights the exact items in their catalog that are referenced in the content — visitors can even add the items to their cart directly from the post.
Action items: Hobbycraft shows how it’s possible to think outside the box when it comes to personalized product recommendations. While this type of content can take a decent amount of time and effort to create, the investment is well worth how much it can help you generate interest in your products and stand out from competing sites that aren’t as creative.
Background: Stumptown is a coffee company based in Portland, with their products available in stores and online all across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan.
Highlights: Stumptown’s website has a quiz section, where visitors can enter information about how they brew their coffee, their favorite flavors, and other relevant variables. After completing the quiz, Stumptown directs the visitor to the products that best match their answers.
Action items: Sometimes, the best way to collect information about your customers is to come right out and ask for it. By designing a quiz of your own, you’ll be able to gather the data you need to provide highly relevant product recommendations.
Background: Forever 21 sells fast-fashion clothing, shoes, and accessories.
Highlights: Whenever someone adds an item to their cart on the Forever 21 website, a pop-up window will open promoting other items that they may be interested in.
Action items: You certainly don’t want to bombard visitors with too many pop-ups — that sort of negative user experience can drive potential customers away for good. But when used sparingly, this technique all but guarantees that you will be able to grab the visitor’s attention and get them to notice your personalized offer.
Shogun makes it easy to offer personalized product recommendations on your Shopify or BigCommerce storefront. To do so, you simply need to follow these steps:
Now, let’s take this a step further and personalize the product recommendations section:
After you’ve completed these steps and published your personalized experience, the new page variant you created will only be shown to the audience segment you’re targeting. Everyone else will still see the original version of the page.
You can use this process to add personalized product recommendations to your homepage, collection pages, product pages, and just about anywhere else on your site.
