Solved

Automated Related Products by metafield, is there an app?

Jaimie
Tourist
4 1 2

I've got a database of over 13,000 items and need to customize the related products. Doing this by Tag, Collection, Product Name or Description, or past customer purchases won't work in my case.
I have been looking for an app that might let me Limit related product suggestions based on:

  • items in stock
  • Products with two or three metafields matching certain criteria based on the product being viewed

Each product has  a unique set of related products that can be calculated based on rules such as above, identical combiniations of metafield entries such as "Model = X" and "Colour Set = Y", and "Group = Z", these are not fields I want the customer to see on the front end, they just help dictate related products.

One rule might be related items are the same model and Colour Set for example, and it's in stock. Another rule might be it's the same Colour and Group, but ignores model.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions? The majority of apps available do not seem to offer the option to restrict by metafield rules. Manually setting related products is not an ideal solution for me. I have tried the manual approach such as https://alanryan.dev/tips/recommended-products/ (found this on the shopify community), but the issue for me is this won't auto hide products not in stock, and the other drawback is it's not user friendly to manage for the average shop manager.

Accepted Solution (1)
Jaimie
Tourist
4 1 2

This is an accepted solution.

Quick update as I ended up finding a solution to this. I decided to go ahead with the app Recomatic Related Products (https://apps.shopify.com/recomatic), using the app I was able to add custom product tags which the app uses to give hierarchy to related products to move up "key tagged" items up the top of the list. This has worked very well for me as I can use custom prefixed tags and a number of them so that say for example, products with 3 prefixed tags identical to the product being viewed, will appear before products with 2 prefixed tags. A different but workable approach. An advantage too is that regular tags kick in after there are no prefixed tagged products in stock available to suggest so that's when other more distant related products kick in.

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Replies 5 (5)

jonathangardn
Shopify Partner
19 3 8

 Hey @Jaimie, correct me if I am wrong.

What you are saying is you'd like an app to create these conditions, having access to all the meta fields and combining them to create lists of recommended products?

So, you want to have a "trigger" metafield in the product viewed and generate the recommended products that match the conditions you created in the app you'd like to have right? 

Jonathan Giardino
Founder of Flash Promos | Creator of Building meaningful Shopify Apps
Jaimie
Tourist
4 1 2

Hi Jonathan,

Yes, something like this would be perfect, and ideally to only show available products (in stock and in the right sales channel).

I think ideally it would be standalone and not "replace" the recommended products as I think that's still practical for customers also viewed or also bought. The conditions I'm working on allow a shop owner to truely add a narrowed down "related products" section completely controlled by rules set by the shop owner.

jonathangardn
Shopify Partner
19 3 8

Good to know, I am an app developer and I have started a newsletter called Building meaningful Shopify Apps (BMSA)  that aims to increase the gap between merchants/founders and app developers, to make the ecosystem stronger than ever.

I will take your feedback and distill it to developers, hopefully, something will come up 🙂 


Jonathan Giardino
Founder of Flash Promos | Creator of Building meaningful Shopify Apps
Jaimie
Tourist
4 1 2

Thank you Jonathan

Jaimie
Tourist
4 1 2

This is an accepted solution.

Quick update as I ended up finding a solution to this. I decided to go ahead with the app Recomatic Related Products (https://apps.shopify.com/recomatic), using the app I was able to add custom product tags which the app uses to give hierarchy to related products to move up "key tagged" items up the top of the list. This has worked very well for me as I can use custom prefixed tags and a number of them so that say for example, products with 3 prefixed tags identical to the product being viewed, will appear before products with 2 prefixed tags. A different but workable approach. An advantage too is that regular tags kick in after there are no prefixed tagged products in stock available to suggest so that's when other more distant related products kick in.