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What Somix Related Products does

Recommendations, cross-sells and buy-together bundles as a theme app block — and what that means for your storefront.

Somix Related Products puts product recommendations on your storefront: related items, cross-sells, add-ons, recently viewed, and buy-together bundles with an optional discount. It installs as a theme app block, so there is no code to paste and nothing left in your theme when you remove it.

How it works

You build a widget in the app: where it appears, what shape it takes, how products are chosen, and how it looks. Then you drop the Somix block onto the template you want it on, and the block draws whichever of your widgets belongs there.

The part worth knowing is what happens at request time: nothing. Your storefront never calls our servers to render a widget. Its configuration is read out of a Shopify metafield in Liquid, and the products come from Shopify’s own recommendations endpoint on their CDN. That is why the app can be fast on a store we have never seen.

What you need

  • A Shopify store with the Online Store channel — Somix renders in your theme, so it cannot work without one.
  • A theme that supports app blocks. Every Online Store 2.0 theme does, including all of Shopify’s free themes.
  • A few products. Recommendations need something to recommend; a store with three products in one collection will look thin whatever app you use.

The two switches

Almost every “the widget is not showing” message we get is one of these two being off. They are separate on purpose — the first turns the app on for your theme, the second decides where on the page it draws.

  • The app embed loads the shared stylesheet and script, and connects the widget to your cart. On its own it renders nothing.
  • The app block is the thing on the page. It only draws where you place it.

The setup guide on the app’s home page walks you through both and ticks each step off once it can see it is done — it reads your live theme to check, so there is nothing to mark by hand.

Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — we would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.