How products are chosen
Every recommendation source, what each is good for, and when the work happens.
How products are chosen, under Recommendations, is the setting that decides everything about what a shopper sees. The options fall into three groups, and they differ in more than results — they differ in when the work happens.
Shopify’s own recommendations
- Shopify’s related products — what Shopify considers similar to the product being viewed.
- Shopify’s complementary products — what goes with it. You can curate these in Shopify’s own Search & Discovery app, and Somix will follow what you set there.
Both are resolved by Shopify at request time from their CDN. They cost you nothing, they improve as your store gathers order history, and they need no maintenance.
From your catalogue
- Same collection, Same vendor, Same product type, Shares a tag
- Best sellers, Newest arrivals
These are worked out in your theme as the page renders, from your catalogue as it stands right now. Add a product to a collection and it becomes eligible immediately — there is nothing to re-save and nothing to wait for.
Chosen by you
Products I choose
Pick exactly what appears. Use it for the pairings you know work and an algorithm will not guess — the strap that fits one watch, the refill for one machine.
Rules I define
Describe the pairing once and Somix keeps it current: products tagged summer recommend from the Summer collection, and next season’s arrivals are covered the moment you tag them.
Which to use
Start with Shopify’s related products on a product page. It needs no work, it is rarely embarrassing, and it gives you a baseline in the analytics to judge anything else against. Move to a curated source where you can see the automatic one getting it wrong — and use the per-widget numbers to decide, rather than an impression from looking at it.
Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — we would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.