Strategies

Strategies define how products are selected for a block. Each anchor type supports different strategies.

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Interaction strategies

Use behavioral data to find products that customers frequently interact with together. Interaction data is computed periodically based on historical events.

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Collection interaction strategies

Use behavioral data to find products related to a collection based on how shoppers who browse that collection interact with products. Unlike product interaction strategies (which find product-to-product relationships), collection interaction strategies compute collection-to-product relationships.

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Similar products strategy

Use vector similarity to find products that are visually and semantically similar to the anchor product. Supported anchors: Product, Collection How it works: The system generates embeddings for each product based on product images, titles, descriptions, and attributes. It then runs the full ranking pipeline — combining vector similarity with behavioral signals — and stores the top results for each product in a precomputed cache. When a customer views a product, the block serves results directly from this cache for fast response times. If no precomputed data exists yet (for example, for a newly added product), the system falls back to real-time vector search automatically. For collection anchors, the system automatically selects a representative product from the collection to use as the similarity source. Precomputed results and freshness:

• Results are recomputed daily when the existing data is more than three days old or new products have been added since the last run
• When a product’s embeddings are updated (for example, after editing its title, description, or images), that product’s similar products are recomputed incrementally
• All filters, facets, pagination, and sort orders continue to work as expected on precomputed results
• No configuration is required — precomputed caching is enabled automatically for stores with active similar products blocks

Use cases:

• “Similar Products” on product pages
• “You May Also Like” recommendations
• Visual discovery and exploration
• Collection-based similarity recommendations

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Manual strategy

Curate products using a collection or hand-picked product IDs, with optional custom sorting. This strategy gives you complete control over which products appear in the block. Supported anchors: Product, Collection, Cart, None The example below shows selecting the manual strategy when you want to hand-pick which products appear in a block. Configuration:

• Hand-picked products: Select specific products by ID in the dashboard. The display order matches the order you define. When hand-picked product IDs are configured, they take priority over collection-based selection.
• Per-anchor product picks: For product-anchored blocks, you can hand-pick different recommendations for specific anchor products. When a customer views a product that has anchor-specific picks configured, those picks are returned instead of the default list. If no anchor-specific picks exist for the current product, the block falls back to the default hand-picked products.
• Collection anchor blocks: The collection is determined dynamically from the API request’s anchor_id parameter (no collection selection needed in dashboard)
• None anchor blocks: Select a collection to pull products from in the dashboard
• Optionally apply a sort order for custom sorting

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Per-anchor product picks

Per-anchor product picks let you tailor manual block recommendations based on which product a customer is viewing. Instead of showing the same hand-picked products for every anchor, you can define unique product lists for specific anchors. How it works:

1. You configure a default set of hand-picked products for the block
2. Optionally, you add per-anchor overrides for specific products
3. When the block is requested with an anchor_id:
   • If the anchor has specific picks configured, those products are returned
   • Otherwise, the default hand-picked products are returned

This is useful when certain products have natural pairings that differ from your general recommendations. For example, a “Complete the Look” block might show different accessories depending on which clothing item a customer is viewing. Use cases:

• “Best Sellers” block (collection of top products, sorted by sales)
• “New Arrivals” block (collection of recent products, sorted by date)
• “Editor’s Picks” (curated collection with custom order)
• “Staff Picks” (hand-picked products in a specific order)
• Seasonal promotions (collection of seasonal products)
• “Complete the Look” with product-specific accessory pairings
• Targeted cross-sells that vary by anchor product

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Trending strategies

Show what’s popular across the store without needing a shopper or anchor product. Trending strategies are ideal for top-of-funnel surfaces like the home page or 404 pages where you have no other context to work with.

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Contextual strategies

Use signals from the page itself — the search query, the traffic source, or the cart total — to select products. Contextual strategies are aware of what brought the shopper to the page rather than who the shopper is.

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Strategy availability by anchor type

Not all strategies are available for all anchor types. Use this matrix to plan which strategy to pick for the surface you’re building.