Related products

[BridalHotspot]

How many related products should maximum I have on the product pages?
I see a lot of conflicting answers on many blogs. Hope that someone can help me out!

[JCurrier]

I'd be interested in hearing what you have found out so far in your research.

Amazon is famous for recommending products and their related products span pages. There is also the idea that you don't want to overwhelm your customer with too many options. I'd say the best way to know for your industry is to first research what your competitors are doing, and then build some tests around that to see what works for you.

[BridalHotspot]

Funny how you mention Amazon, because I actually followed their lead on adding as much as possible, but just making sure that they are relevant products from the same category and that I stay under a 100 links per page.

On several blogs I read that it should be a maximum 4-8 products and I think that that isn't much. Maybe if you don't have the horizontal scrolling arrows, then that amount would be understandable, but I do have these arrows just like Amazon does.

I'm only doubting myself now, because a friend SEO told me that I have way to many related products.

[JCurrier]

How are the related products decided? Are these complementary products or substitute products. Are they grouped by a category or by user actions (viewed together).

To further use Amazon as an example; if you look at books compared to bridal gowns (I assume this is something related to your industry), you can see that books are displayed by those commonly bought together and gowns are displayed by those also viewed by customers (or possibly purchased instead of).

They really have no shortage of products in any category as far as I can tell, and they also list products carried by third-parties. I can only imagine that this is a bit of a larger scale than most people will be working with. I am in no way an expert on this matter, but I'd just suggest maybe getting a few users opinions. Poll your customers and see what they say. Also run some A/B testing and measure the results.

Additionally, without details as to what specific products you are selling, it will be hard to find a more definitive answer since all industries vary.

[EGOL]

There is also the idea that you don't want to overwhelm your customer with too many options.

heh.... I agree...  I hate when the recommendations are crap.    I'd rather see two tightly related products than a hundred dumb ones.   I think that they need a relevance score and cut off the list when it falls below a certain level.

[EGOL]

Are these complementary products or substitute products.

Good idea... like "accessories".  That related list could be pretty long and still be a tight fit.

[BridalHotspot]

I try to keep my related products in the same category, because the way I see it when someone is looking for a wedding dress, they rather see more wedding dress suggestions than jumping to accessories. The accessories may be added to the suggestion on the checkout page (I'm looking into that at the moment).

I'm going to take crusader's advise and ask different opinions and do some testing to see what works better.

Thank you both for taking the time to reply.