How to Exclude Products From Recommendations
Overview
Some products don’t require recommendations because shoppers purchase them without hesitation. To maximize the impact of recommendations, it’s best to exclude these items and focus on those that drive sales.
With AfterShip Personalization, you can exclude specific products or product types, ensuring only the most relevant items are recommended. This guide will walk you through the process of excluding products from recommendations strategies.
Demo
Steps for product exclusion
- Log in to your AfterShip Personalization account.
- Navigate to Merchandising engine > Strategies page.
- Edit the existing strategy to exclude products from the recommendations widget or smart offers or create a new strategy.
- Click Edit to access the product recommendations widget editor.
- Scroll down to Exclusions section to exclude products that will not be displayed as recommendations.
- You can exclude products based on 5 different criteria.
Criteria | Sub-criteria | Description |
|---|---|---|
Exclude products in customer's cart or order |
| Prevents recommending items that the customer has already purchased or are currently present in their cart, ensuring variety in suggestions. |
Exclude specific products |
| Allows you to handpick specific products to exclude from recommendations based on your business strategy. |
Exclude by tag (as defined in Shopify) |
| Excludes products based on assigned tags in Shopify, offering flexibility in managing product recommendations. |
Exclude by collection (as defined in Shopify) |
| Allows you to exclude entire collections, ensuring certain product categories are not included in recommendations. |
Exclude by vendor (as defined in Shopify) |
| Enables exclusion based on vendors in Shopify, which is useful if you want to prioritize specific brands or suppliers in recommendations. |
Exclude by purchase option |
| This exclusion targets specific purchase types for products. You can choose to exclude recommendations based on whether the product is available for subscription or one-time purchase. |
| Exclude subscription products | If a customer is already subscribed to a product, you don’t want to recommend the same subscription option again. This prevents redundancy in recommendations. |
| Exclude one-time purchase products | If you’re promoting a subscription model and want to exclude one-time purchases, you could prevent one-time purchase products from being displayed in smart offers. |
Example, you have decided to manually select products to not show them as recommendations on your product pages.
- Select the checkbox for Exclude specific products.
- Click Select products.
- On the popup, search product(s) by name or browse through the products in the dropdown that are currently active in your Shopify store. Select products you want to exclude.
- Click Confirm.
The selected products will be excluded from recommendations in the designated widget on your product pages.
- Click Save
How exclusion rules are applied through strategies
- You design your recommendation strategy, which determines which products will be included in the recommendations widget or smart offers.
- You set up exclusion rules to make sure certain products or product types are excluded from the strategy, ensuring that irrelevant or redundant products aren’t shown to customers.
- After exclusions are set, you save the strategy and it’s applied across your website’s widgets (like on product pages, in cart, or on checkout pages).
- As a result, the system only shows products that align with the strategy’s criteria and are also within the bounds of the exclusions you’ve set. This ensures the customer gets highly relevant and tailored recommendations.
Additional considerations
- If you are excluding products based on tags, make sure to first add the tags when listing your products on Shopify store. If case you haven’t, just go to Products in your Shopify admin and assign tags to products. The tags you assign to your products on Shopify will list here.
- The pinned products will override any exclusion rules.
In case you need any further assistance, please contact our support team.
Updated on: 20/01/2026