Choosing Your On-Site Widgets
For best results, implement Pleisty personalized product recommendation widgets in all pages throughout the conversion journey. The most important pages to optimize with Pleisty widgets are:
- Your shop's homepage
- Product pages
- Category pages
- Shopping cart
- 404 and out-of-stock pages
Implementing Pleisty widgets in these pages will typically increase your shop's conversion rate by an average of 10%.
Homepage Widgets
The homepage is the first point of contact with your shop for your most important audience - your returning visitors. This makes it a special target for personalization, as customizing the content for these audiences increases both conversion rates and chances these users will return to your shop later. For new visitors, you will want to show your shop's bestsellers and new items in your catalog, which are useful to new and returning visitors alike.
For best results, place the widgets as high on the page as possible (ideally just below the hero banner) because their relevant content will lead to optimal conversion rates for your page. The personalized product recommendations should come first, followed by the generic product recommendations (bestsellers, discounted items, etc), as shown in Figure 1.
Screenshot not preserved in this archive *Figure 1. Pleisty homepage widget types*Each Pleisty widget can be customized to address the specific needs of your business. The following table describes the widgets' default behavior.
| Widget | Visible to | Type of recommendations |
|---|---|---|
| H01 | Users with click history | Personalized product recommendations based on the “intent of the moment” (user’s last few clicks in the shop) |
| H02 | Users with click history | Personalized product recommendations based on user’s entire known click history. |
| H03 | All users | Popularity-based recommendations with optional filters for promotions, discounts, and custom merchandising rules. |
| H04 | All users | Novelty-based recommendations with optional filters for promotions, discounts, and custom merchandising rules. |
| Smart History | Users with recently viewed items | User’s recently viewed items slightly rearranged for optimizing relevancy and click-through rate. |
Category Page Recommendations
From a product recommendations perspective, the category page is similar to the homepage, except that all products are from a single category. As such, Pleisty provides five widgets, C01, C02, C03, C04, and Smart History, similar to those in product pages. The ideal configuration depends on the specifics of the shop and a Pleisty Solutions Architect will guide you to make the best choices for your shop.
Product Page Recommendations
On the product page you'll typically want to add product recommendations related to the specific product. You can either go for widgets along the lines of "Customers who bought this item, also bought" and "Customers who viewed this item, also viewed", or along the lines of "Similar items" and "Complementary items", and anywhere in between. To put this in practice Pleisty provides three recommended widgets for your product page: P01, P02, and Smart History. The ideal placement of P01 and P02 is just below the short product description, and the ideal placement of Smart History is just above the page footer.
Screenshot not preserved in this archive *Figure 2. Pleisty product page widget types*The complete list of widgts you can install in the product page and their behaviour is described in the following table:
| Widget | Visible to | Type of recommendations |
|---|---|---|
| P01 | All users | Similar item recommendations based on collaborative filtering ("users who viewed this item, also viewed") with additional optional filters on category, price range, and others, depending on the requirements of your shop. |
| P02 | All users | Complementary item recommendations based on collaborative filtering ("users who bought this item, also bought") with additional optional filters for category exclusion and others, depending on the custom requirements of your shop. |
| P03 | All users | Additional recommendations from the same brand/color/other attribute |
| Smart History | Users with recently viewed items | User’s recently viewed items slightly rearranged for optimizing relevancy and click-through rate. |
Shopping Cart Recommendations
Pleisty provides two widgets that have good conversion rates in the shopping cart: SC01, and Smart History. The ideal placement of these widgets is just below the shopping cart items, as shown in the following figure.
Screenshot not preserved in this archive *Figure 3. Pleisty shopping cart widget types*The default behaviour of SC01 and Smart History is described in the following table.
| Widget | Visible to | Type of recommendations |
|---|---|---|
| SC01 | All users | Complementary items to those in the cart generated using collaborative filtering ("users who bought this item, also bought") with additional optional filters for category exclusion and others, depending on the custom requirements of your shop |
| Smart History | Users with recently viewed items | User’s recently viewed items slightly rearranged for optimizing relevancy and click-through rate. |
Out-of-Stock Recommendations
The out-of-stock page is the page of a product that is no longer in stock. If your shop uses a single layout for both in-stock and out-of-stock products, then you can use the same recommendations for both pages.
Compared to an in-stock product page, the out-of-stock page cannot generate a transaction on its own (unless you offer the possiblity of backordering), so it becomes even more important to get your users to browse alternative items that are in stock. To ensure maximum changes for success, you should:
- place your recommendations as high up in the page (ideally just below the basic product details of the main item, above the detailed product description)
- use at least three lines of product recommendations - such as viewed together, bought together, more items from the same brand
- make all widgets scrollable to offer high variety to the interested user