On-site product recommendations

On-site product recommendations are small groups of suggested products shown to visitors while they browse, inside a pop-up, a banner or a block on a page. Some are personalised, based on what the visitor viewed or bought before. Others follow rules you set, such as best sellers, new arrivals or items often bought together. Justuno, OptinMonster and Privy are examples of tools that offer it.

Shoppers rarely find everything you sell by themselves. Suggestions help them discover items they would not have looked for, and they can raise the amount spent per order or bring a visitor back to products they looked at earlier. They are also a natural fit inside a campaign, for example showing relevant products alongside a discount.

They matter most for shops with a catalogue large enough that browsing is hard. A shop with a handful of products gets little from them.

Quality depends on the product data and on how much activity the tool can see. With little history, personalised suggestions fall back on general ones, so manual rules may do better at first.

• Are suggestions based on individual behaviour, on rules you set, or both.
• Does the tool read your product catalogue directly from your shop platform, and how quickly do changes show up.
• Can you exclude out-of-stock items and products you do not want promoted.
• Can you measure the extra sales that came from recommendations.