6 Product Recommendation Examples You Can Use to Boost Order Values (with Templates)

Want shoppers to spend more per order on your ecommerce store? Give show time to more products as people buy from you.

But instead of relying on a tiresome ‘customers also bought’ carousels at the bottom of your product page, make product recommendations that are:

• As personalized and relevant as possible
• Offered at the right time

So, what are some attention-grabbing ways to recommend products at the right time? Let’s look at six product recommendation examples to help you understand how and when other ecommerce brands are making product suggestions to their customers to buy more from them. 

We’ll also walk you through different types of product recommendations to try for yourself—and give you templates too, so you start growing your sales today.

What are product recommendations?

Product recommendations are suggestions you make to your customers about other products in your catalog. The aim behind these recommendations is simple: to get people adding more products to their shopping cart—increasing order value and revenue.

Key metrics a good prodct recommendation strategy can affect are:

• Average order value (AOV)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) and first-order profitability
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)

However, to achieve this, you need to make personalized product recommendations. In fact, the more relevant your recommendations are to a shopper, the more likely they are to take you up on the offer.

Why recommend products to online shoppers?

Suggested product widgets are an easy way to encourage the purchase-ready traffic landing on your page to navigate your website. Instead of leaving them stuck, the widget boosts their chances of finding a product(s) they were looking for and shopping from you.

Data confirms this with product recommendations accounting for up to 31% of ecommerce revenue.

Essentially, you’re widening the number of products on display, which increases your chances of showing a product somebody wants to buy.

Types of product recommendations

Before we dive in any deeper, let’s look at the different types of product recommendations you can make:

• Product page in-line carousel. A widely used product recommendation widget on the landing page that features products related to the one being used.
• Product quiz. This type asks visitors a few questions to share personalized product recommendations. Read the playbook.
• Add to cart upsell. This uses a popup that shows immediately as a buyer adds a product to their cart, recommending similar products. Read the playbook.
• In-cart upsell. This shows product suggestions on the cart page itself—either in some kind of popup overlay or embedded in-line on the page itself. Read the playbook.
• Returning customer cross-sell. This recommends products to folks who’ve already purchased from you before. You can do this with follow-up emails, SMS texts, and on-site messages targeted at returning customers.

Now for the examples of how other brands are driving sales by making relevant product suggestions to their shoppers:

1. Grovemade’s supplementary product recommendations

As soon as a shopper adds a product to their cart, Grovemade uses an add to cart upsell popup—suggesting a highly-relevant product specific to the product in the cart.

For instance:

Notebook refills are essentials to shop for when getting a notebook. But a buyer may not remember that, so Grovemade recommends notebook refills:

The best part? The product recommendation widget uses a clean, minimalist design. Not only does this align with Grovemade’s overall brand look, but it also presents the product recommendation clearly—in a clutter-free space. 

Also, there’s one clear call-to-action (CTA) button in a contrasting, on-brand color that accompanies the recommendation—making it both prominent and easy to click. 

Grovemade doesn’t stop there, though.

Toward the end of the product landing page, it shares more product recommendations—from the same collection to increase the order value:

For any shopper who loves the collection or has been eyeing it pre-launch, these static product suggestions are the only subtle push they need to shop for more products. 

Grovemade makes a final attempt to encourage the shopper to buy more when they go to their cart:

It’s here that it shows “frequently bought together” products with direct add to cart buttons so buyers can get them in one simple click.

2. Modcloth’s embedded page product recommendations

Modcloth shows recommendations of clothes that other customers are buying—exactly below the product a shopper is viewing:

In doing so, the retailer uses social proof to grow sales as shoppers are likely to be interested in buying what others like them are getting. 

That said:

If a shopper is returning to Modcloth’s site—having viewed a product or two but not having purchased it—the site also shows them those products:

The retailer also takes another jab at putting more products on display by sharing products (including ratings) in the last section of their page:

Note that it doesn’t show reviews of just any products. Instead, Modcloth shows ratings of other top-rated products—again using social proof to encourage people to buy. 

3. Nordstrom’s cart upsell product recommendations popup

Another example is Nordstrom’s add to cart upsell popup that shows up immediately when a shopper adds a product to their cart:

The popup’s intent is to take the shopper to their cart. But as it does so, it also puts others products on show—ones that other buyers typically buy with the product added to the cart. 

Within this popup is another subtle attempt at using more social proof to drive sales—a "popular" tag on one of the products:

This leverages FOMO to encourage people to buy as the shopper can see others are making these purchases. In doing so, the tag also makes it easy for the shopper to decide what to buy—saving them from the overwhelm that they might experience from all the variety of products available at Nordstrom. 

Once a buyer clicks through to their cart, though, Nordstrom shows more products using a sidebar showcasing other clothes that people viewed:

In the last step as a buyer attempts to checkout, there’s another embedded in-cart upsell—this one’s below the checkout button, showing more products from the brand added to the cart:

Note that all of these product recommendation widgets are designed to be clutter-free. They show only each product’s:

• Image
• Star rating (for social proof)
• Price

All of this provides buyers with the most important information they need when selecting products, making shopping easy for them.

4. Dropps’ product quiz personalized recommendations 

Sustainable detergent store, Dropps, offers customers an ecommerce quiz to help them find the best-fit products for them:

As site visitors share their answers in the quiz, Dropps gets an opportunity to learn about them (and build its first-party audience data). At the end of it, Dropps asks for a visitor’s email and phone number to send them personalized emails and text messages based on the answers they’ve shared in the quiz:

This way, the product recommendation quiz is a great way for Dropps to not only make personalized product recommendations but also to drive repeat orders.

As quiz takers share their contact details, Dropps takes them to a landing page featuring personalized recommendations:

These product recommendations come with all the necessary details to remove friction from shopping—the number of pods in each box, pricing for one-time purchase and subscription, the product’s scent, and a one-line explanation of what each product helps with.

5. Bloom & Wild’s in-cart upsell product recommendations

Bloom & Wild leverages upselling as a tactic to recommend products. To this end, the flower delivery service suggests a handful of products to shoppers as a full-screen takeover during the checkout process:

The interesting bit is the conversion-driving copy used here. It says “there’s still space in the box for one extra treat” which quickly tells the buyer that the box could look empty (a tempting thought when you’re gifting flowers to someone) to encourage them to buy more.

Bloom & Wild also adds a clearly visible ‘Skip’ button to their upsell popup—giving uninterested buyers an easy route to exit before they change their mind and shop from another place.

6. Allswell’s in-cart slide-in product recommendations

As with Grovemade and Nordstrom’s product recommendation examples, Allswell’s recommendations also come in the cart.

But to make sure the product suggestions catch shoppers’ attention, Allswell uses a slide-in popup that surfaces from the side:

From there, another tray opens from the side to show related products.

The colors used in this popup all align with Allswell’s brand, making the popup look like a part of the site—a must-follow step for designing high-converting popups.

The product recommendations themselves feature clear images of the suggested products to encourage people to click through and explore.

Each product’s price accompanies its image and name, which is a great way to be transparent to shoppers. In fact, this way, buyers would only click to explore those products that are within their budget.

How to create a product recommendation popup

You can create your own product recommendation feature using ConvertFlow. We have templates for:

• Popups
• Slide-ins/corner popups
• Embeds
• Landing pages

All of which can be customized using our products element to send personalized recommendations to your shoppers based on the data you’ve already got about them. This data could be as simple as the current page a shopper is looking at or as advanced as preferences collected during a recommendation quiz.

If you're using ConvertFlow's Shopify integration, you can even pull a live product feed into any ConvertFlow campaign and filter what gets shown based on a number of options:

You can also build specific conditional product recommendations. This allows even greater control of the logic that determines what products show to each shopper:

Now that you've seen how product recommendation works on live ecommerce websites, use these free product recommendation popup templates to start recommending products to shoppers.

We've got campaign templates for all kinds of formats:

• Landing pages
• Popups
• Slide-ins
• Embeds
• Quizzes

The ones we share below all include product elements ready for you to customize to your store. However, you can simply add in products to any of our templates with the click of a button.

Here are a few to get you started: