This article explains Product Recommendations, which adds personalized product suggestions to the return portal powered by Loop's recommendation engine to increase exchange rates and revenue retention. It covers how the feature analyzes product catalogs and shopper behavior to suggest relevant alternatives, setup requirements including Advanced plan status, an available refund or store credit outcome, and a connected payment method for collecting upsell, and instructions for excluding specific products from recommendations using the loop_recommendations_exclude tag.

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Product Recommendations adds an additional exchange option to your return portal, powered by Loop's product recommendations engine. When enabled, shoppers will see personalized product suggestions alongside variant and Advanced Exchange options during their return.

Product Recommendations integrates Loop's recommendation engine directly into your return flow. When a shopper initiates a return, they'll see an option to exchange their item for products recommended by Loop's engine alongside your existing exchange options.

The recommendation engine analyzes your product catalog and shopper behavior to suggest products that are likely to result in a successful exchange. This feature is designed to:

• Increase exchange rates by presenting relevant alternatives

• Decrease refund rates through strategic product suggestions

• Drive upsell opportunities with recommended items

• Improve overall revenue retention

Because the recommendations are powered by Loop's engine rather than manual curation, shoppers may see products at different price points than their original item. The engine prioritizes relevance and likelihood of exchange over price matching.

Before enabling Product Recommendations, verify that your shop has:

1. Advanced plan - The configurations required for Product Recommendations are only available on Advanced plans.

2. Exchange outcome enabled - This feature works alongside variant exchanges. If you don't currently offer variant exchanges, Loop won't show Product Recommendations.

3. Refund or store credit outcome available - Merchants must have one of these two options available to handle partial refunds when exchange prices differ.

4. Payment collection method in place — Product Recommendations always charges or refunds the price difference on a recommended item, so you need either a Loop + Stripe integration or upsell via Shopify invoicing.

   Note: Product Recommendations is not governed by your price difference settings. Enabling it will not change how your variant exchanges or Advanced Exchanges handle price gaps — those are configured separately. See Different Priced Exchanges.

Merchants can turn Product Recommendations on on their own.

1. Navigate to the Product Recommendations page in the Loop admin.

2. Work through the steps to ensure that your shop meets the requirements and best practices.

3. When your shop meets all the requirements as laid out on that page, you will be free to enable the Product Recommendations feature.

4. Merchants can turn the feature off from this page at any time.

You may have products that shouldn't be recommended to shoppers, such as gift cards, return fees (like Checkout+), or package insurance (like Route). To prevent specific products from appearing in recommendations:

1. In your Shopify admin, go to the product you want to exclude.

2. Add the tag loop_recommendations_exclude to the product.

3. Tagged products will be blocked from the recommendation engine and won't appear as exchange options.

Product Recommendations requires an Advanced plan. The feature requires configurations that are only available at this plan level.

If you want to add this feature, please contact your Merchant Success Manager to amend your account.

Can I control which products are recommended to shoppers? The recommendations are generated automatically by Loop's engine based on your product catalog and shopper behavior. However, you can prevent specific products from being recommended by adding the loop_recommendations_exclude tag in Shopify.

What happens if the recommendation engine doesn't return any products? If the call to the recommendation engine fails or no suitable products are found, shoppers simply won't see the product recommendations option. They'll still be able to complete their return using your other configured exchange options.

Do recommended products need to match the price of the returned item? No. The recommendation engine prioritizes relevance and likelihood of exchange over price matching. Recommended exchanges always charge the difference when the recommended item costs more and refund it when it costs less, with no separate setting to configure. This is why a payment collection method is required.

Can I use this feature without offering variant exchanges? No. Product Recommendations works alongside variant exchanges and requires that outcome to be enabled.

Please reach out to support@loopreturns.com with any additional questions.