Key Takeaways
- Personalization drives growth: Tailoring the shopping experience helps turn casual visitors into buyers and builds long-term loyalty in a crowded market.
- Start with a personalized homepage: Use past behavior to show relevant products or videos right away so shoppers feel understood from their first click.
- Recommendations should feel relevant: Filter products by interests, location, or season to help customers quickly find what actually fits their needs.
- Video makes personalization stronger: Personalized product videos explain value, features, and use cases more clearly than images or text alone.
- Trust leads to higher conversions: When shoppers see products presented in a way that matches their interests, they feel more confident and are more likely to buy.
With the e-commerce industry growing at rapid pace, personalizing your customer experience is the key to thriving in its competitive world. It can make all the difference between a successful sale and a missed opportunity.
By leveraging the power of personalization, online stores can do more to cater to their customers and encourage customer loyalty, ultimately boosting sales as well. Check out the ways you can incorporate more personalization in your e-commerce store.
1. Personalize the Homepage
Creating a personalized homepage is one of the best ways to promote your business online and make your customers feel like valued members of your brand. With the use of cookies, you can gather information about your customers' past interactions and interests and use it to create a more tailored experience on your homepage.
An easy yet effective way to achieve this is by incorporating recommendations in the form of product videos that match your customers' general interests. By customizing the user experience from the get-go, you can make sure your customers feel appreciated as soon as they visit your store and increase the possibility of conversions.
One example of a website that does this well is Netflix, which uses personalized videos on their homepage to make sure users see the content tailored to their preferences.
» Here's how to add videos to your Shopify homepage
2. Personalize Product Recommendations
Product recommendations are an important part of the e-commerce experience because they can help customers find the products they need more easily. When choosing recommendations, consider incorporating the following for the best results:
- Different types of filtering
- Location-specific products
- Seasonal items
For the highest level of personalization, you can use videos to show your customers exactly how their recommended product works, what features it has, and why it may be the perfect choice for them. By creating personalized product explainer videos, you can help your customers learn more about the product before purchasing, building customer trust and leading to more sales.
» Learn more about shoppable videos in e-commerce
Pro Tip: Personalization Works Best When Shoppers Can Choose
Personalization is most effective when customers actively guide their own experience instead of being passively shown recommendations.
- Personalize with intent, not just data: Use Tolstoy interactive videos on your homepage that ask a simple question like “Who are you shopping for?” or “What are you looking to solve?” and route shoppers to relevant products instantly.
- Swap static recs for shoppable explainers: Replace generic “Recommended for you” grids with short product videos that explain why a product fits that shopper’s needs, use case, or season.
- Match personalization to placement: Use broader interest-based videos on the homepage, and hyper-specific shoppable videos on PDPs where intent is highest and decisions happen faster.
FAQs
Start personalization where intent is already strongest to avoid overfitting shallow data.
- Identify the top 3 entry pages by revenue (usually homepage, PDPs, collections).
- Use broad signals first (returning vs. new visitor, device, location).
- Personalize only one element per page (e.g., hero video or product row) to isolate impact.
- Validate lift before layering deeper behavioral logic.
Homepage personalization works when it reduces choice overload, not when it adds novelty.
- Swap static hero banners for product-led videos matched to visitor intent.
- Prioritize “continue where you left off” modules over generic bestsellers.
- Use social-proof video (UGC, demos) instead of promotional copy for first-time visitors.
- Measure assisted conversions, not bounce rate alone.
Learn how to add videos to your Shopify homepage.
Personalization feels safe when it’s contextual, not predictive.
- Base personalization on session behavior before historical data.
- Avoid referencing exact past actions (“You looked at this yesterday”).
- Let users self-select preferences through clicks, quizzes, or video choices.
- Clearly signal why something is shown (“Recommended for winter use”).
Explore the best practices of effective interactive marketing strategies.
Recommendations should evolve from discovery to reassurance as intent increases.
- On homepages, show inspirational or category-level recommendations.
- On PDPs, surface comparison, compatibility, or “used together” videos.
- Near checkout, focus on risk-reduction content (returns, fit, demos).
- Use video formats more heavily as customers move closer to purchase.
AI Shopper personalizes by conversing, not guessing.
- Deploy AI Shopper to ask clarifying questions about needs, budget, or use case.
- Let it recommend products based on answers instead of static rules.
- Capture repeated questions to identify gaps in PDP content.
- Feed insights back into your product pages and video assets.
Discover Tolstoy AI Shopper and how it can help you personalize product recommendations in your store.
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