What are Related Products?

Related Products are curated or automatically generated product suggestions placed alongside the item a shopper is currently viewing. They typically appear on the product detail page beneath the description or the gallery, and often reappear in the cart drawer, on category pages and in post-purchase views. The selection can be editorial, rule based or model driven, and it usually mixes complementary items, alternatives from the same category and accessories. In practice the block serves cross-selling and up-selling, catches shoppers who arrived on a narrow entry page, and keeps navigation moving without a return to search.

Definition

Related Products describes any module that maps one product to a set of neighbouring products. Manual relations are maintained in the catalogue or the PIM and give editorial control. Rule based relations derive from shared attributes such as category, brand, colour or price band. Behavioural relations come from co-view and co-purchase data collected across sessions. The approaches differ in cold start behaviour: manual and rule based lists work for new catalogue items, behavioural lists need traffic first. Common pitfalls include listing out of stock variants, repeating the item already on the page, and presenting accessories as compatible when they are not.

Why it matters

In a composable storefront the relation set is not part of the page template but a separate data source. The frontend requests recommendations through a dedicated API, depending on the setup from the commerce backend, the PIM or a specialised recommendation service, and merges the response with catalogue data for price, availability and media. Because the block is personalised or frequently recalculated, it often stays outside the statically cached page and is hydrated at the edge or on the client, so the product page itself keeps a long cache lifetime. Response time budgets, fallback lists and defined behaviour when the service is unavailable belong in the component contract.

Use cases

The primary placement is the product detail page, where a block below the fold catches visitors who do not convert on the current item. A compact variant in the cart or cart drawer proposes accessories matching what is already selected. Category and search result pages use the same mechanism to fill thin result sets. After the purchase, confirmation pages and transactional emails reuse the same relations for follow-up offers. Measurement usually separates click through on the block from attributed revenue and compares basket composition with and without the module, since a visible block does not automatically mean additional order value.

Related

Explore Recommendation Engine · AOV (Average Order Value).