Related and complementary products

With the free Shopify Search & Discovery app, you can easily select related and complementary products and display them on your online store (this is also known as cross-selling or cross-sell products).

While both are product recommendations, they differ in their intent:

• Complementary products are products that are often bought together. For instance, if you are selling skis, a complementary product could be a pair of gloves or ski boots. A customer buying one might purchase the other.
• On the other hand, related products are similar to the ones the customer sees. For instance, on a ski product page, related products will show another ski. While the customer might be interested in the other ski, they probably won't purchase both.

Creating product recommendations

Both complementary and related products must be set up in the free Shopify Search & Discovery app. You can find more information about it by clicking here.

Note that Shopify offers automatic recommendations for related products powered by AI. Complementary products, however, must be manually set up.

Showing up complementary products

Complementary products display inside the main product page section.

Before showing them on your theme, you must manually select the complementary products in the Shopify Search & Discovery app. You can find more information about how to configure complementary products in Shopify documentation.

Once you have selected the complementary products, you must add the complementary products block to your theme to show the products.

To do that, open the theme editor, navigate to the product page, click "Add block" and select "Complementary products." The screencast below will guide you through the steps:

Showing up related products

Related products display below the main product page section as a standalone section. To add the related products section, open the theme editor, navigate to the product page, click "Add section" and select "Related products". The screencast below will guide you through the steps:

FAQ

• Products do not appear: if some products you have selected do not, ensure they are eligible. Especially, free or sold-out products won't appear as recommendations (this is a Shopify limitation that can't be lifted on our end).
• Can we automatically select complementary products? As of today, only related products can be automatically selected. If you would like to have automatic complementary products, we recommend you to contact Shopify support to suggest them this improvement.