How do global recommendations work?

In Frequently Bought Together you can configure which products are displayed as recommendations for all other products. This is what we call Global Recommendations. 

Global recommendations appear after the manual and automatic recommendations for each product. The order of the recommendations is first manual, then automatic, then global and finally random.

What can I use global recommendations for?

We suggest using global recommendations to promote best sellers or the newest products. In general, products that you would like to be sold with most other products and don't have a large enough sales history.

How can I configure global recommendations?

Frequently Bought Together offers two alternatives for configuring global recommendations, by manually selecting the products that will be displayed as global recommendations or by tagging them in the Shopify product editing page. Even though both configurations work equally well, we strongly recommend the former over the latter.

Selecting global recommendations manually

That said, if you want to configure global recommendations just navigate through the app's preferences (found on the side panel) and click on Recommendation Tuning:


 Once inside the section, click on the Configure global recommendation button:

Initially, there are no global recommendations configured so we can start adding the products of your preference simply by clicking on the Add product as a global recommendation button

and selecting the products in the product selector pop-up. You can check one or more products at the same time, speeding things up and minimizing the configuration effort. Once you are done, click on Add.

Finally, you will see the selected products and will be able to change their order. Note that unless shuffle option is enabled, global recommendations will appear in the order you set here, the higher products in the list will be displayed first.

You can alter the order as you like using the drag and drop icon at the left of the product. Similarly, if you want to remove products from the global recommendations, just click on the delete, at the right of the product, for each item you want to remove.

Tagging global recommendations

As we mentioned before, you can configure global recommendations by tagging products with the exact text Global recommendation.

This tagging can be done in the Shopify product editing page:

It's important to note the application does not impose any order on the tagged global recommendations, they are displayed after the manual global recommendations in a random manner unless shuffle option is enabled.

The tagged global recommendations are also displayed in the global recommendation configuration page. This combined view is very convenient as long as it allows you to know exactly the global recommendations configuration at a glance.

Shuffle recommendations

Optionally, you can shuffle all the global recommendations using the following option below the previous controls:

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