Recommendations

Best Practices

Get the most out of Recommendations by following these steps.

This article details the best ways of using Recommendations to increase your conversion rate, basket size and order value significantly. They are based on our 10+ years of eCommerce experience, across thousands of stores.

Pages & Logics #

The table below summarises the most effective Clerk.io’s logics for each section of your webshop:

PositionLogicsWhy
Home Page
  • Visitors Recommendations/ Recommendations based on Orders
  • Best Sellers
  • Hot Products
  • Newest Products
The Frontpage is the big window in the street, displaying the items that will lure in customers by showing them content that might interest them. Generally, the Frontpage is not where webshops make the most sales, but it’s great at exposing your catalog to both new and returning customers
Category Page
  • Best Sellers/Hot Products in Category
In a Category, customers know which direction they’re going. Make sure you help them find the right product, by showing bestsellers in each category by displaying the following recommendations below the category description.
Product Page
  • Best Alternative Products
  • Best Cross Sell Products
This page will often be the entry point of the customers coming from Google. You want to keep them on the webshop even if the product they found wasn’t the right one. Present them with great alternatives and products that other customers bought with this one by displaying relevant recommendations.
Powerstep
  • Best Cross Sell Products
  • Visitors Recommendations
  • Best Sellers
  • Best Offers
This is the step where you can get the most extra sales. When the customer adds a product to the basket you should clearly confirm their action and show them a link to the baske t, but also present them with relevant products based on their interests. The Powerstep can even be implemented as a pop up or full page.
Cart Page
  • Best Cross Sell Products
The basket is the final step where you have a chance to sell extra products. Most customers will not add anything expensive here, so you need to focus on cheaper products.
Blog Page
  • Products Related to a Page
  • Categories Related to a Page
Content pages such as blogs, news, articles and landing pages can help you convert visitors into buying clients. These pages can get more SEO traction the older they are, from gathering more links and shares so it is important to keep them relevant with updated product recommendations.

When placing the recommendation sliders in the different sections of your webshop, remember that visibility plays also an important role: as a general suggestion, the higher in the page Clerk.io’s sliders will be placed the better their performance will be.

Create customised designs #

Users become familiar with small details of your webshop so it is important to maintain design consistency across the whole website.

Whether you want to make a new design from scratch or edit a pre-built one, with Clerk.io’s intuitive Design Editor, you can create a completely customised design for your product slider that matches your company branding in just a few clicks.

The designs are fully responsive and they are ready to be used with any mobile devices.

In a slider, it is important to include rich product information such as images, names, prices, and even a call-to-action button to place the product in the basket.

Moreover, badges allow you to focus your visitors’ attention on given products based on the selected rules.

In the case working directly with code suits you better, you will also be able to create and modify the Recommendations designs with HTML and CSS.

Analyze and Optimize #

Finally, it’s time to analyse the results.

Clerk.io’s intuitive dashboard will provide you a clear overview of the performance of the tool and detailed data for each  recommendation slider, such as Total Revenue, Return on Investment and impact on Basket Size and Average Order Value.

You can then apply small optimisations, like trying different logics or different slider positioning.