Product attributes — colour, material, size, price band, scent, style, use case, brand — are the raw material for recommendations that feel hand-picked instead of random. When you match on attributes, you can recommend a product a shopper has never seen because it shares the qualities of one they clearly like, rather than falling back […]
Category Archives: Product Discovery and Merchandising
To personalize recommendations for gift shoppers, stop treating their behavior as a signal about their own taste, because it isn’t. A gift buyer’s clicks describe someone else — a recipient you know almost nothing about. So the usual “you viewed this, here’s more like it” logic quietly breaks. The fix is to read the gift […]
Match your recommendations to the buying stage by asking one question before you pick a product to show: is this person still figuring out what they want, deciding between options, or ready to buy? A first-time browser and a repeat customer who just placed their third order need completely different things, and showing both the […]
To make a large catalog feel smaller, you don’t cut products — you cut the number of choices any one shopper has to face at a time. A store with 3,000 SKUs shouldn’t feel like 3,000 decisions. It should feel like a good salesperson quietly narrowing the shelf to the eight things that fit this […]
The fastest audience for a new product is the customers you already have, and the way to reach them is to match the launch to what each person has already shown interest in — not to blast the whole list at once. Your existing customers trust you, know your quality, and have already paid you […]
You guide customers through a large catalog by making choices for them, not by giving them more ways to choose. The overwhelmed shopper doesn’t need another filter, a bigger menu, or a fourth level of subcategories — they need a clear path: a short, relevant set of products that fits what they’re trying to do, […]
A product recommendation audit is a short, structured check of whether the “you may also like” logic across your store is actually earning extra revenue — or just filling space and quietly shifting sales around. You can run the core of it in an afternoon. Walk five areas in order: what your blocks currently show […]
If you run a store with hundreds or thousands of SKUs and conversion feels stuck, the answer is almost never another layer of navigation. It’s follow-up. A big catalog fails shoppers not because they can’t find a category, but because they see a handful of products, get overwhelmed, and leave before they find the right […]
When someone views a stroller, a set of speakers, and a cast iron pan in one session, don’t try to average those signals into a single recommendation — you’ll get mush. The right move is to recognize that scattered browsing usually means one of a few specific things (a gift shopper, an exploratory first visit, […]
When a customer keeps coming back to the same category without buying, treat it as a strong signal and respond to it directly: help them decide within that category rather than pushing them somewhere new. Repeat visits to one section — running shoes, desk lamps, red wine — mean genuine interest and, usually, a specific […]