Introduction to Product Recommendations

updated 2 yrs ago

In this guide, you can read and learn about product recommendations and how they work.

Why should I use personalized product recommendations?

By using Hello Retail to personalize your recommendations you know that they’ll always be relevant for the user who is viewing them. Our recommendations are based on user behavior so they are much more accurate in predicting what people will buy than recommendations which have been manually uploaded. You can target your marketing to an audience of one, make a personal connection with your customers and predict what products future customers will want to see.

Every customer sees a unique selection of products which are tailored to their preferences and browsing behavior. And, because our predictions are so accurate there’s a high probability they will add some of them to their cart. That’s why personalized product recommendations can help to boost your conversion rate, average order size and repeat purchase rate.

How do they work?

When people view your site, Hello Retail automatically stores information about their behavior and preferences. We constantly map all this behavior to create relationships between the different products.

The more frequently two or more products are connected with each other the stronger the relationship between them is. So whenever an item is viewed, considered or purchased in connection with another a relationship between the two is created.

We give these relationships scores – whichever has the highest score has the strongest relationship.

So that means that if customers have added batteries for the digital camera they’ve just bought, chances are the next customer who looks at digital cameras will want to add the batteries too. The predictions will become more accurate over time as we accumulate more and more data about product relationships.

We take these predictions and implement them as recommendation tiles on your website.

Here’s how Coolshop.dk use our product recommendations on their product pages:

Recommendation strategies

There are different recommendation strategies available for Hello Retail customers.

You can read more about them here.

Can I choose how the recommendations look on my site?

Yes, you’ve got complete design freedom. It’s up to you to choose the formatting, layout and style of your recommendations. We know it’s important that the recommendations work seamlessly on your webshop, so that’s why there’s no limits on the design. It’s up to you to select a style and layout that suits your branding and the design of your site.

You can use them to create different effects across your site so you can be flexible in how you choose to use them across different pages. You can choose what information to include in them. You can include the:

Product image
Product name
Buttons such as “add to cart” or “see more”
Information about whether the product is in stock or not
Product rating
How long it will take to deliver the product
A product description
Original and discounted price

You can also choose how to describe the recommendations and how to lay them out on the website. For example, you might want to have them under the title “Recommended for you”, “Related products”, “Popular Items” or anything else you want.

Here’s how Miinto use our recommendations on their site:

Can I choose which products are relevant?

Recommendations can either be calculated based on the behavior of all users on your webshop, on a particular customer’s behavior or on a particular product.

Once you’ve picked one of these three options you can choose to add filters to it. So you might want to select recommendations based on the behavior of a particular customer and then on the basis of their gender. Or, recommendations centered on a particular product and then the country your customer is viewing your site from.

Because there are so many possibilities to choose from, it’s easy to create recommendations that suit your customer segmentation and marketing strategies.

Some of the most popular strategies are:

Upselling – displaying similar products with a higher price tag
Cross-selling – displaying complementary products
Trending products or recently bought – displaying products or brands that have just been bought on your shop
Bestsellers or popular products – displays your best selling products.

Whichever strategy you choose, the products will be selected based on their relevancy scores.

Here’s how Legeakademiet.dk use our recommendations on their site:

Can I use these recommendations off-site too?

Yes, we can incorporate these product recommendations into your newsletters, retargeting or display banners, and abandoned cart or price drop notifications.