Recommendations built into the online store

Most customers buy one item and leave. Recommendations show them the next item while they’re still in the store. These are the boxes you’re familiar with from all major online stores: “Others also viewed” below the product, and “Others also bought” in the shopping cart.

The difference is that you don’t have to manually link items yourself. Shoporama uses your store’s own data to determine which products go together and displays them where they’re most effective.

Five types, so you can choose based on the page

• Others also viewed – what other visitors looked at during the same visit. Most effective on product pages.
• Others also bought —items that were actually purchased together in real orders. Most effective in the shopping cart, where the customer has already made up their mind.
• Related products —the items you’ve selected yourself, if you’d rather decide for yourself.
• Popular Right Now —top sellers over the last 90 days. Works well on the homepage, in an empty cart, and on an empty search results page.
• Customer’s Recently Viewed – the individual visitor’s own browsing history.

If you’re unsure, leave the module set to Automatic. It will then choose based on page type: product pages show “Others also viewed,” the cart shows “Others also bought,” and search and 404 pages show “Popular.”

Set up in minutes

Recommendations is a module in the Page Designer. Drag it onto the page where you want it to appear, set the heading and type, and save. The box uses your own product card design, so images, prices, sale tags, stock status, and the “Add to Cart” button look exactly the same as in the rest of the store.

A good starting point is three boxes: “Others also viewed” on the product page, “Others also bought” in the cart, and “Popular right now” on the homepage.

Works even before you have data

The classic challenge with recommendations is the first few weeks and every new product you create. There’s no behavior to analyze, so most solutions fall back on the same bestsellers on every single page.

Shoporama builds up the recommendations in layers instead. If there isn’t enough behavioral data, it first uses items purchased together with the product, then items similar to it based on category, brand, features, and price range, followed by popular items in the same category, and only at the very end, the store’s bestsellers. So a product you added to your cart yesterday will also receive recommendations related to that item.

You can see the results

Under Statistics → Recommendations, you’ll find views, clicks, click-through rate, orders, and attributed revenue—both in total and broken down by the five types—with a daily graph and CSV export.

The figures are intentionally conservative. An item is only counted if the customer has clicked on it in a recommendation box and purchases that exact item within seven days. Impressions without clicks never generate revenue, and the other items in the order are not included. We’ve chosen this model because a figure you can trust is more useful than a higher figure you have to take with a grain of salt.

Without sacrificing speed

The page loads without recommendations, and the box is fetched afterward, so it never delays the initial display. Space is reserved in advance so the page doesn’t stutter when the items load. No external files are fetched, the code is about 5 KB, and the response is cached. Pages with recommendations can still be cached statically, just as before.

Also in your own theme

In Shoporama’s built-in themes, recommendations are a module in the Page Designer. If you’ve created your own theme, you can still add them without editing code: simply specify a CSS selector in the admin panel, choose whether the box should appear before, after, or inside the element, and save. If the element isn’t present on a page, nothing happens, so it’s safe to experiment. If you’re a developer, you can position the box precisely using a tag in the template.

Built-in, no extra app

Recommendations are an integral part of Shoporama. You don’t need to install an app, pay per view, or send a product feed to an external service. This feature is our answer to recommendation tools like Clerk.io and Nosto—but without the recurring cost and without your customer data leaving the platform. Just turn it on and you’re ready to go.

If you want to use “Others Also Viewed,” visitor statistics must be enabled under Account → Webstore. The other types work regardless. See also the guide to get started.