5 Website Personalization Examples for Ecommerce Stores

Website personalization allows ecommerce business owners to tailor the shopping experience to each visitor, and research shows that customers appreciate personalization. 

According to Hyken’s State of Customer Service & CX study, 82% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience (including knowing what they’ve bought in the past, how often they buy, and the questions, concerns, and comments they’ve had), and 63% are willing to pay more for it. 

Business owners use website personalization to target a range of business goals, including increasing conversion rates, boosting customer retention, and increasing average order value (AOV). Here’s what small business owners need to know about website personalization, as well as five website personalization examples to help you get started.

What is website personalization?

Website personalization is the practice of tailoring website experiences for individual users. It’s a two-part process:

1. Anticipate user needs. A business uses demographic and behavioral data to identify individual visitor preferences and needs.

2. Deliver personalized website experiences. The business personalizes site content, structure, or layout for individual users.

An effective website personalization strategy makes it easier for users to navigate your site and allows your marketing team to serve them with more relevant promotional and marketing messages. Businesses can personalize any element of a website’s design or structure. Here are four common examples:

• Language and pricing. Localized currency and language display.

• Content. Tailored banners or hero images, text blocks, and image or video content.

• Product suggestions. Personalized shopping sections, add-to-cart recommendations, and cross-sell and upsell features.

• Pop-ups. Promotional pop-ups and calls-to-action (CTAs).

The idea is to offer a personalized customer experience that enhances customer satisfaction and makes your website a more effective sales and marketing tool.

How does website personalization work?

There are two main approaches to personalization:

• Dynamic personalization. Dynamic personalization anticipates an individual visitor’s needs, creates a unique website experience, and delivers it to a target audience of one. It relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning software to personalize site experiences in real time.

• Cohort-based personalization. Cohort-based personalization delivers tailored experiences to specific customer segments. It allows business owners to create personalized experiences while maintaining creative control over a finite number of site versions.

The right strategy for you will depend on your goals, technology budget, customer data, and audience expectations. If you offer different services in different regions, for example, you might use cohort-based personalization to tailor site content based on a visitor’s geographic location, creating distinct versions for consumers from different regions. You might then use dynamic content personalization to recommend products based on past purchases. 

Both strategies rely on accurate customer data. Marketers can capture customer data using a customer relationship management system (CRM) or a customer data platform (CDP). Shopify store owners can take advantage of the platform’s built-in CDP for unified data management across multiple channels.

Website personalization vs. customization

In the web design world, personalization and customization describe two distinct approaches. Personalized experiences are based on preexisting customer intelligence, and customized ones require customers to make choices. Here are two examples of customization:

Birdy Grey

The wedding apparel and accessories company Birdy Grey provides one example of website customization. The homepage invites customers to choose between two top-level selections, Birdy Grey and Birdy Grey Suits. Each selection initiates a distinct customer journey, matching visitors with relevant content at the cohort level.

“We knew that we had to tailor the experience to both the bride who’s making the decision and to the groomsmen who are the end sort of purchaser,” founder Grace Lee Chen says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “The site experience feels very seamless, but if you’re shopping dresses on our site, it’s very tailored to a dress experience. The groom’s experience is completely different.”

Crown Affair

The haircare company Crown Affair has a product discovery quiz that helps customers land on personalized recommendations. “People can tell us about their hair, and then through that we offer different bundles that might cater to them,” says Elaine Choi. “It’s really about creating that experience that spits out something that feels personalized.” 

The Shopify App Store has product discovery quiz tools that integrate directly with Shopify storefronts and enable these types of quizzes. 

5 website personalization examples

• Lucy & Yak: Personalized product suggestions
• Joola: Location-based experiences
• Asos: Targeted promotions
• Revenge Of: Behaviorally triggered pop-ups
• Repurpose: Cart-based personalization

Here are five website personalization examples to inspire your personalization efforts:

Lucy & Yak: Personalized product suggestions

The apparel brand Lucy & Yak sells a wide selection of colorful dungarees, tops, sweaters, jumpsuits, and accessories. In addition to having clear website navigation menus, Lucy & Yak automatically suggests relevant products at the bottom of each product page. As customers browse, they can explore curated options they may not have found by filtering through other menus. 

Tools like Shopify Search & Discovery, Shopify Flow, and Shopify’s built-in recommendations features can surface relevant products based on browsing history, past purchases, and cohort-level patterns in customer behavior.

Joola: Location-based experiences

Location-based personalization tailors site content based on a visitor’s geographical location. It can adjust site language, currency, and units, display targeted messages, or tailor product assortments by region.

Richard Lee, CEO of the pickleball gear and apparel retailer Joola, relies on the Shopify platform to show different product arrays in different locations. Users based in Germany see a more limited selection of Pro series pickleball paddles than US users, for example—just 30 options compared to the US site’s 59. 

Joola also uses the platform to localize language and currency for each market. “Shopify turned out to be the best for us because we needed that ability to scale quickly, and we needed to launch websites in multiple countries,” Richard says on Shopify Masters.

You can use Shopify’s translation and localization features to sell in up to 20 languages. Shopify Markets also allows business owners to customize product assortments and other site elements by customer group. 

Asos: Targeted promotions

Customer preferences and decision drivers vary by audience segment, and personalized offers allow you to target groups like new customers, VIPs, and frequent browsers with promotional messages tailored to their customer journey stage. Examples include promotional pop-ups, banners, and checkout incentives. 

In this example, the apparel brand Asos has different offers depending on whether you are a new website visitor or a returning customer. If you visit the website without having made a purchase before, you get a WELCOME discount code for 20% off your first order.

Returning visitors (who are signed in to their account) do not see the discount code on the homepage. Instead, they see a reminder that the brand covers tariffs and duties so customers won’t encounter surprise fees. This keeps the information relevant so those ineligible for a first-time discount won’t misread the promotion and be deterred by a code not working for them. 

Use tools like Shopify Markets and Shopify Segmentation to segment customers using first-party data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and location.

Revenge Of: Behaviorally triggered pop-ups

Website pop-ups triggered by user behavior are a real-time website personalization strategy that allows you to respond to exit intent or product interest with tailored messages. 

The comic book shop Revenge Of uses the Fomo app to reach customers with targeted pop-ups, for example. Fomo dynamically tracks on-site user behavior and responds with messages designed to encourage conversion. 

“Fomo not only reminds a customer what’s in their cart, but it tells you ‘Someone in Sacramento bought this comic,’ or ‘There are only four of this item left,’” cofounder Joe Myers says on Shopify Masters. 

In this example, a small pop-up on the top-right of the page notifies a visitor to the Hollow Twilight product page that only two copies remain in stock, a message intended to create a sense of urgency.

Repurpose: Cart-based personalizations

Cart-based personalizations can include cross-sells, upsells, and incentives, such as shipping discounts or other freebies included at a certain order value. Like behaviorally triggered pop-ups, cart-based personalization strategies allow you to gather all the data you need during a single user session by using cart contents as the data set behind personalization decisions.

Lauren Gropper, founder of the sustainable home goods brand Repurpose, used cart-based personalization to address the fact that customers who bought their sustainable toilet paper rarely purchased other product types, for example. The company uses targeted cart-level promotions to encourage customers to explore other product lines and build deeper brand loyalty.

Customers who click the cart icon see personalized product recommendations (dubbed “customer favorites”) in a right-hand pop-up window alongside cart contents. Recommendations for customers purchasing toilet paper include paper towels and stemless wine glasses.

Repurpose also uses its checkout page to encourage customers to upgrade to its subscription service with personalized messaging tallying the amount the subscription could save.