A strategic approach to ecommerce personalization is key to ensuring your business stands out in the market—and personalization is something that customers expect across all touchpoints. It’s also good for your bottom line, which is why 89% of business leaders believe personalization will be valuable to their business success in the next three years.
But it can be difficult for brands to deliver. For one thing, the death of third-party cookies has made it difficult for retailers who had become reliant on them—which is to say, most retailers—to create the personalization experiences that their customers want.
But not only is personalization still within reach, but it’s now poised to become more powerful than ever, as brands switch to utilizing first-party data instead. This is data that retailers own and customers opt in to, including the quizzes and forms customers fill out, past purchase history, browsing behavior, and so forth. With first-party data in hand, unified into a single ecommerce platform, retailers can create more relevant and powerful personalization experiences throughout the ecommerce funnel—and can even work personalization into IRL experiences.
Learning the basics of ecommerce personalization with first-party data can help you sell more, retain customers, and increase customer lifetime value. Let’s take a closer look at how to go about it.
Ecommerce personalization is the practice of tailoring online shopping experiences to individual customers.
This is done by delivering relevant content, product recommendations, offers, shopping experiences, and support based on customer preferences, behavior, and demographics—these days, using first-party data. It aims to enhance customer satisfaction, engagement, and conversion rates by providing a personalized shopping journey.
With personalization, you can show relevant products to your customers based on their browsing history.
According to a report by ecommerce personalization platform and consultancy Monetate, personalized product recommendations can increase conversion rates by up to 8% thanks to the increased relevance of the suggestions. Personalized recommendations also drive up lifetime value, as they increase the likelihood that a customer will return for more.
By creating a personalized shopping experience based on customers’ needs and interests, you can improve overall customer satisfaction.
It also makes the shopping experience more convenient, something that 87% of millennials say impacts their decision-making, according to market research from data and tech company Numerator.
And it’s not just the experience of browsing: Personalized marketing also increases the relevance of outreach efforts, lowering the chances that a customer will hide advertisements in their social feeds or unsubscribe from a company newsletter, thereby keeping the channels of communication open.
Likewise, customer service agents, whether human or AI chatbots, are better able to provide the support their customers need when they are fully briefed with a customer profile that includes past purchases, browsing history, and issues they’ve communicated about before. Such, personalized customer service experiences are a powerful means of retaining customers.
You can also increase AOV with ecommerce personalization. Monetate found brands can increase AOV by up to 12% by tailoring the customer journey. Personalized product recommendations can help cross-sell and upsell complementary or higher-value items. You can also send tailored discounts and bundle products based on buying behavior.
You know that customer service example we just discussed? Once an agent has provided great service, that’s a great time to cross- or upsell. In fact, cross-selling can even be the solution when a customer calls in looking for an out-of-stock product. With customer buying habits and previous purchases in hand, the agent can easily recommend similar products to satisfy the customer’s needs.
Here are twelve scalable tactics for ecommerce personalization:
The days of simply offering 10% off for an email address are fading. Forward-thinking retailers are working on ways to encourage customers to identify themselves, to create genuine value for both parties.
Retailers are making signing in to a customer profile an obvious choice, rather than another marketing hurdle. When retailers build habits around logged-in experiences, customers can find all types of hidden value, such as:
What makes this strategy particularly powerful is how it aligns with changing consumer expectations around privacy and data sharing.
Customers actively choose to identify themselves in exchange for genuine utility. It’s the difference between a store clerk following you around versus having a personal shopping assistant you’ve specifically requested.
When buyers adopt these login habits, they discover an ecosystem of product recommendations, saved carts, highlighted discounts or store credit, and more.
The key for retailers looking to implement this approach is starting with the customer’s perspective.
By focusing on solving real customer problems rather than just gathering data, retailers can build sign-in experiences that customers genuinely appreciate and actively seek out.
Product-detail page (PDP) recommendations show shoppers similar or complementary products to the ones they’re already interested in, based on an analysis of their browsing and purchase history, and expressed preferences.
You can take advantage of dynamic upselling by recommending items higher in price but similar in style or brand.
Cross-selling on PDPs makes it easier to recommend complementary items and inspire online shoppers to increase their cart size.
Pura Vida Bracelets uses Yotpo for customer reviews and Nosto for personalization. The brand creates two recommendation categories on their product pages:
Griffin Thall, cofounder of Pura Vida Bracelets, used the Nosto integration with Shopify, saying the platform “truly allowed us to sync our operations with vendors, apps and tech partners, as well as provide amazing reporting.”
Loyalty programs have evolved from basic points systems into data-driven programs that reward customers in meaningful ways. They also create a treasure trove of first-party data you can use for further personalization efforts across your sales channels.
Consider how a luxury beauty retailer might use loyalty program data to personalize the experience of a hypothetical customer we’ll call Amy. The retailer can see:
Amy has accumulated points steadily but only redeems them for full-size products, never samples. She engages with emails about skincare launches but rarely clicks on makeup promotions.
With this behavioral data, the retailer can tailor their approach to Amy specifically in multiple ways:
But the real power comes from identifying patterns across your loyalty-member base. When you notice that customers who redeem points for full-size products (like Amy) tend to have 30% higher lifetime value than those who choose samples, you can adjust your loyalty program strategy accordingly. You might create special full-size product redemption offers for members who typically choose samples, nudging them toward more valuable behavior patterns.
Combining segmentation with loyalty data allows enterprises to create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns—but the key is to make it feel natural. Loyalty programs provide the data to make this possible at scale, while giving customers a clear value exchange for sharing their preferences.
People are drawn to popular products—think of the magic of the New York Times bestseller book list. To shake things up, you can highlight your bestsellers over a designated period of time. Campus Protein used this tactic and doubled its conversions year over year.
You can get creative with this approach: instead of ranking products by sales, try displaying the most reviewed, or segment by location.
Showing bestsellers by location can be powerful if you sell fashion in multiple climates or if your online store specializes in sports team gear. Your customers in Los Angeles probably aren’t shopping for the same clothing during winter as shoppers in New York City. Find what works best for your unique products and customers.
User-generated content (UGC) can bring another dimension to your site. When you post photos, videos, and reviews from customers, visitors get the chance to see your product in real life.
Consumers are receptive to making peer-based decisions. In the US, 46% of consumers say they learn about new and interesting products from friends and acquaintances.
Most businesses stop short of integrating UGC throughout their onsite funnel, limiting its use to ratings on product pages or shares on social media.
Shoe company SeaVees makes UGC collected from Instagram prominent on its homepage and PDPs by linking directly to a curated collection of shoppable posts, many of which are submitted by customers through SeaVees-branded hashtags:
Dynamic content changes based on user behavior, location, or demographic data. For example, a first-time visitor might see an introductory discount banner, while a returning customer is shown a product recommendation based on a recent purchase.
Shopify’s platform makes it easy to collect the data for this type of web content. For example, you can capture:
To start implementing dynamic content, identify your highest-impact personalization opportunities. Focus first on basic segmentation like new versus returning visitors or location-based offers, then gradually expand to more sophisticated behavioral targeting.
Monitor your analytics closely to measure engagement and conversion improvements. With Shopify’s built-in ecommerce personalization tools and data collection features, you can quickly test different strategies and scale what works best for your specific customer base.
When customers log in to a storefront, they unlock a personalized discovery experience that goes far beyond basic product recommendations.
Retailers often build their storefronts around two distinct types of value: prepurchase discovery (like personalized collection reviews and wishlist management) and post-purchase engagement (such as order management and simplified reordering).
The power lies in how these personalized storefronts use their unified customer data model to create what feels like an intuitive shopping experience.
For example, when a logged-in customer returns to your store, they don’t just see generic category pages: They encounter a storefront that understands their preferences, previous purchases, and browsing patterns. You can also create landing pages that cater to their customer segment and showcase products and offers more relevant to them.
The product collections they see, the recommendations they receive, and even the way products are presented are all subtly tailored to their demonstrated interests and behaviors.
Shopify’s Search and Discover app plays a role here. This app allows you to customize how customers discover your products. You can create custom filters for search and collection pages, activate semantic search, and recommend related products on product detail pages. This enhances the relevance of search results and helps customers find what they’re looking for more easily.
Offsite retargeting can be expensive. Thankfully, onsite interstitials are an alternative. The key is to be intuitive, not intrusive, with your popups.
You can do this by timing or triggering popup offers to match each visitor’s in-session behavior. Trigger these popups through automation based on characteristics like number of sessions, shopping cart value, and browsing behavior (both historical and real time).
It’s a good idea to offer first-time visitors exclusive discounts and promotions in exchange for their email addresses so you can market to them. Here’s an example from cosmetics brand Colourpop:
Once someone adds items to their cart, you can offer tiered discounts to drive up average order value (AOV).
Another great popup option is to re-engage returning visitors with reminders of what they’ve browsed (but never purchased) in order to drive them toward checkout.
AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants are changing the customer journey. These tools provide instant, personalized support and recommendations based on individual customer profiles. A 2024 survey from Segment found that 58% of business leaders believe AI chatbots will be the most impactful personalization technology over the next 5 years.
When integrated with a unified customer data model, these AI solutions can leverage a wealth of first-party data to make each interaction more precise and relevant.
For example, with Shop’s AI Assistant, customers can describe what they’re looking for, and the AI assistant will provide contextual recommendations based on the customer’s preferences and the store’s inventory.
It can also:
Leveraging these tools lets merchants provide 24/7 customer support while keeping each interaction personalized and relevant to the shopper’s needs.
Even if a visitor leaves your site, there are ways to get their attention back through retargeting on social media. To make this approach successful, you need to choose your timing wisely.
One of the more advanced forms of retargeting is granulated retargeting. The average value of a site visitor declines the longer they’ve been away from your site, so you can save a lot on ad spend by layering your retargeting as their value declines. You can also shorten your retargeting period to 7–14 days so you’re engaging customers when they’re most likely to convert.
It’s important to be mindful of how you’re approaching these shoppers, whether it’s with products relevant to their previous purchases or by reminding them of your unique selling proposition.
BOOM! By Cindy Joseph, for example, is a cosmetics company that sends retargeting ads after customers visit their homepage and collection page. They focus on social proof and how other customers find the brand.
If an online shopper shares their email address or mobile number with you, your brand has another way to engage and convert them. By continuously engaging customers, you can reach out no matter where your customers are, which keeps your company top of mind.
Here are three messaging techniques to get their attention:
Optimizing your checkout experience is a necessary step to reducing cart abandonment, but you’ll never eliminate it altogether. For example, many shoppers get distracted and leave ecommerce sites with items still in their carts.
When this happens, you can remind them with an abandoned cart email. Clothing company American Giant sends customers an email containing items they left in their cart to encourage them to come back and finish the purchase.
If a shopper forgets about their cart, you can nudge them with a kind email. Sports fan-gear seller Supporters Place sends emails to re-engage visitors and announce new, exciting products to remind them of what they looked at in the past.
Checkout is not the end of your relationship with a customer. Check in with buyers after purchase and provide customized product recommendations based on their previous orders.
Here’s how baby and child sleepwear store ergoPouch does it:
Learn more: 10 omnichannel examples
Retailers have traditionally seen checkout as the final step in a transaction. Today, checkout is becoming a surface for gathering data and building a picture of your customer.
We’re talking beyond customizing background colors and fonts. With Shopify, for example, you can:
Retailers can maintain their unique checkout optimizations, whether that’s smart upsells, integrated loyalty programs, or specialized analytics—while still offering the speed and convenience of trusted payment solutions like Shop Pay, which boasts over 150 million users.
The implications extend far beyond the moment of purchase: Each checkout interaction builds a richer picture of your customer, feeding back into your first-party data foundation. This creates a cycle in which better data leads to more personalized experiences, which in turn lead to more valuable customer interactions.
📚Learn: 5 Ways to Customize Shopify Checkout
It’s no secret ecommerce personalization has changed people’s expectations of retail brands. No longer can you get away with mass marketing, or offering generic experiences to your audience. Every interaction needs to be memorable and bespoke in your ecommerce store.
With Shopify, you can build deep marketing automations that tag high-value customers, trigger personalized email marketing campaigns, and improve retargeting efforts. That way, you can delight your customer base and grow your store.
Personalization is very important in ecommerce because consumers today expect personalized experiences across all digital touchpoints, from product recommendations to tailored content and offers. Personalization helps improve conversion rate optimization, increase engagement, and drive sales. It can help ecommerce businesses build customer loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, and develop a competitive advantage.
Personalization and customization in ecommerce are the processes of customizing a user’s experience by delivering content tailored to their individual needs, interests, and preferences. This could include personalized recommendations for products, tailored ads, and custom content. Website personalization can help make a customer’s shopping experience more efficient by presenting the most relevant products and content.
Customization, on the other hand, allows customers to adjust their desired product or service to their own specific needs and preferences. Examples of customization include changing a product’s size, color, or function, or selecting from a range of options to create a unique product.
Here are 10 tips for personalizing an ecommerce website:
