Enhance Your Product Recommendations with Shopify Scripts

As an e-commerce merchant, one of your highest priorities should be building lasting and trusting relationships with your customers. In order to do that, you need to be able to anticipate their needs and continuously provide value through well-timed offers and user experiences that feel personalized. If you do this effectively, you will be rewarded with their loyalty and maybe even brand ambassadorship.

There’s no easy recipe for success when it comes building this type of relationship with your customers. But if you’re an online merchant selling on the Shopify Plus platform, you can use the power of Shopify Scripts to automate compelling promotional offers within the shopping cart that will help you drive sales and improve shopper satisfaction. Here are some examples of the promotional opportunities Shopify Scripts has to offer:

1. **Free shipping
2. Minimum ($) threshold discounts
3. Tiered pricing discounts
4. Quick discounts
5. Product bundling discounts**

The state of e-commerce today makes it nearly impossible to decouple product recommendations from merchandising strategies. Cross-selling and up-selling are so ubiquitous that practically all e-commerce platforms - Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc. - offer some rudimentary version of it out-of-box. This is both great news and mediocre news; great news because the bar has been raised overall, but mediocre news because with the now level playing field merchants have to continue thinking of new ways to innovate in order to gain a competitive advantage. In short, standard product recommendations have lost most of their novelty amongst even the most novice of online shoppers.

So as a merchant looking to add value to your customer experience, sell through your inventory, and increase important sales metrics like average order value (AOV) and units per transaction (UPT), what do you do? You take a) a more precise approach to up-selling and cross-selling — timing is critical to a successful conversion — and b) you pair it with the right incentives that will nudge your users into action.

We’re going to focus this discussion on the latter point — pairing your product recommendations with the right incentives — but know that the timing component is an important one that must not be overlooked.

First and foremost, it’s on you as the merchant to do the hard work of combing through your store data and establishing a sound merchandising strategy. Consider what types of products often sell well together, which products are naturally complementary, and which products can be combined to create a good customer experience. Selling sneakers? Maybe try cross-selling a bottle of sneaker cleaner. Maybe it’s knitting supplies you’re selling. Try bundling several products together that will get the customer everything s/he needs to get started. It always makes sense to prioritize business needs when thinking about merchandising strategies, but don’t forget to provide your customers with the best possible experience buying from your store.

Okay, here’s where it gets tricky. Despite your best merchandising efforts — strategic cross-selling, up-selling, product bundling, etc. — customers may oftentimes still be completely uninterested in or unwilling to add extra items to their carts as they move through the conversion funnel. Enter the incentives. Incentives can come in various shapes and sizes, but we’ve found that the best performing ones when paired with downstream cross-sells and up-sells, i.e. in the Shopping Bag and Checkout are: free shipping, minimum cart value threshold discounts, tiered pricing discounts, quick (and simple) discounts, and product bundling discounts.