Experimenting with Shopify product recommendation engine app
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
March 4, 2010 [17801 views]
As regular readers of this blog will know, I run an experimental French Food ecommerce store The Market Quarter and use it as a case study for my teaching and a place to experiment with A/B testing, optimisation and marketing ideas.
The site is built using the Shopify platform because that gives me complete control of everything: design, marketing, add-on functionality etc. The store has been operational for over 2 years but it is only in the past few months that it has begun to generate a real flow of orders: just reaching its 500th order.
With increased sales momentum comes a real desire to improve and optimise.
I was therefore very interested to receive an email from Directed Edge about their ExpressRex Recommendation Engine App: an add-on to Shopify that uses your customer data to generate a "people who bought X also bought Y" widget for your shop.
Installation was very straightforward and with a small amount of stylesheet customisation I was up an running in very much less than half a day. I have installed it on both the product pages and on the basket page and it can be seen here "People who bought Fresh Duck Foie Gras also bought..." and the results are exactly what my sales data reveals.
Revealing what people bought, however, is self reinforcing and what I actually wanted to do was highlight the products that I want people to buy: our recommendations. ExpressRex allows this too by providing additional functionality inside the Shopify product editor. I was able to go in and add the Monbazillac wine that we recommend to go with this product and this is added to the order data recommendations.
It is this level of integration and the power of their ecosystem that continues to impress me about Shopify and since adding ExpressRex a number of other Shopify App developers have contacted me to ask me to try out their applications.
Will ExpressRex make a difference to our bottom line? It is too early to know but it certainly improves the visitor experience. I will report back soon on any changes in buying patterns.
What do you think?
