A popular product is a safe bet for a stranger and a weak bet for someone you already know something about. Best-sellers earn their place because they appeal to the widest slice of your audience, which is the exact reason they often miss one specific shopper’s need. When you recommend the same top five to […]
Category Archives: Product Discovery and Merchandising
Merchandising should continue after a shopper leaves because the visit rarely ends with a decision — it ends with a distraction. Most people who browse your store don’t buy on that session, and once they close the tab, your carefully arranged homepage, collection pages, and product grids stop working entirely. The shopper is gone, but […]
A “You may also like” block that shows the same handful of bestsellers to everyone will produce generic results because it isn’t answering a question any specific customer is asking. It shows what’s popular across your whole store, not what fits the person looking at the screen right now. So the block gets ignored, clicks […]
When a customer browses by problem — “my feet hurt after standing all day,” “my dog keeps scratching” — show them the outcome first and the product category second. These shoppers don’t know or care what department the answer lives in. They know their situation and they want relief. So the right thing to show […]
When inventory is limited, recommend the products you can actually fulfil and profit from, and steer demand toward them on purpose — not whatever a default “bestseller” block happens to surface. That usually means promoting in-stock alternatives to your popular-but-scarce items, pushing higher-margin or overstocked products into your recommendation slots, and quietly holding back low-stock […]
When a customer buys from a category they’ve never touched before, recommend things that complete that first purchase, not more of what they used to buy. A new-category order is a signal that their needs have shifted or expanded, and the follow-up should meet them where they just went. Show accessories, consumables, or the natural […]
When customers buy only your best sellers, the fix is not to promote those best sellers harder — it’s to build a second recommendation deliberately, so people meet the products sitting one step past the obvious. A store where 80% of revenue funnels through five SKUs is fragile: your margin is exposed, your slow stock […]
The product discovery journey is the path a shopper takes from the first product they ever see on your store to the third or fourth time they buy without being chased. It has four rough stages: first view, exploration, first purchase, and repeat. Most stores merchandise hard at stage one and then go quiet. That’s […]
To know whether your product recommendations increase revenue or merely reshuffle it, you have to compare customers who saw the recommendations against a holdout group who didn’t — because a recommendation block will always claim credit for sales, including the ones that would have happened anyway. Attributed revenue in your recommendation app is not incremental […]
Purchase history tells you the next category a customer may need because buying patterns repeat in a rough sequence: people who buy A tend to buy B a few weeks or months later, and once you can see that sequence across your own orders, you can put the right category in front of the next […]