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Depict recommendations are rendered by a theme section called Depict Recommendations. Enabling recommendations creates the surfaces that decide what to recommend; you decide where they appear by adding the section to your theme in the Shopify theme editor. Nothing shows up on the storefront until you do.

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Before you start

Recommendations has to be enabled for your store, either by the Depict team or by clicking Enable recommendations on the Recommendations page of the Depict app. That seeds your first surfaces and starts the first computation.

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Surfaces

A surface is a named recipe for what to recommend: an ordered cascade of steps, where each step contributes products until the surface is full. A new setup starts with three: Edit these or add your own in the Depict app under Recommendations: change the recommenders, reorder the steps and set how many products each contributes. A surface that recommends relative to a product only fills on product pages, because it needs that product as its anchor. cart and storefront work anywhere.

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Adding the section to your theme

The example below puts “You may also like” on the product page. The same steps work for the cart, home and collection pages; pick the matching template and surface.
1

Open the theme editor

In Shopify admin go to Online Store → Themes and click Customize on the theme you want to change.
2

Choose the template

In the template selector at the top of the editor, choose Products → Default product.
3

Add the section

In the left sidebar click Add section where you want the recommendations to appear, usually below the product information, and pick Depict Recommendations.
4

Pick the surface

In the section settings, set Recommendation surface to pdp.
5

Set the heading and layout

Type a Heading such as “You may also like”, or leave it blank for no heading, then adjust the layout settings below.
6

Position and save

Drag the section to where you want it on the page and click Save. On an unpublished theme the section goes live when you publish that theme.
The section can only be added to product, cart, home and collection templates. For the other pages, use the home page template with storefront, Cart with cart, and Collections → Default collection with storefront.

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Section settings

The cards reuse your theme’s own product card wherever possible, so fonts, badges and prices match the rest of the store. Anything beyond that can be adjusted with custom CSS.

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Troubleshooting

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”Depict Recommendations” is missing from the Add section list

The Depict app has not installed its files on that particular theme yet, which happens on a fresh duplicate of a theme. Contact us with the name of the theme you are editing and we will set it up.

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The section shows no products

In the theme editor an empty section shows a grey placeholder with the reason: either no surface is picked, or the surface returned nothing for this page. On the live storefront the section is hidden completely, so shoppers never see an empty block. Two common causes:
  • The surface doesn’t fit the page. A product-anchored surface such as pdp has nothing to work from outside a product page. Use storefront for the home and collection pages.
  • The first computation hasn’t finished. Right after enabling recommendations, give it some time and reload the editor.
Recommendations are recomputed for each of your markets on a schedule, so you don’t need to refresh anything when your catalog changes.