Recommending relevant products improves the shopping experience and can lift your revenue — and it takes no development work. In OptiMonk, your popup can carry a product recommender: a row of product cards that either show the exact products you picked or products the OptiMonk runtime chooses live from your store for each visitor.
This article covers:
how a popup with product cards is created
where the product settings live
the five modes: Manual (fixed products), Most viewed, Last visited, Products in the cart, Smart recommendation
what the dynamic modes need before you can select them
How a popup with product cards is created
You don't pick a template, and you don't drag a product element onto a canvas. You describe the campaign in chat, and the agent designs it:
Open the home page and write what you want — for example, "Exit popup for shoppers leaving the men's jackets collection, showing three products with a 10% code."
The agent asks a couple of clarifying questions, then reads your store.
You get concepts with mockups. Pick the one you like and press Build it.
The build turns the mockup into a working popup with a real product component in it.
You do not have to send product links. The agent fetches the real products of your store — and of the exact category you named — by itself, and refuses to invent a product it could not verify. Only when it genuinely cannot find a usable product photo does it ask, once:
Which product should we feature? Send me the product page link — without the real product photo, I could only draw an invented one.
If the store could not be read at all, the popup is still built with a real product component, filled with neutral sample cards (Sample product 1, Sample product 2, …) that you replace in the editor.
Where the product settings live
The product settings are in the popup editor:
Open the campaign from Campaigns in the left menu.
On the Overview tab, click the version's preview image or its name — that opens the editor. (From a design thread, you can also use the Edit button on the built popup, or the tooltip Edit in editor.)
In the editor, click the product row. The panel on the right opens on the product component.
The panel opens with this note:
This is the OM product component. Its cards are filled by the runtime at display time (in a dynamic mode straight from the shop), so a product name, price or picture typed over on the canvas would be silently discarded — edit a card by clicking it, or from the list below. The number of cards comes from the design; it cannot be changed here.
That is the one rule to remember: product text is edited in the panel, not on the canvas.
The panel has:
Mode — the dropdown described below.
Open the product in a new tab — whether clicking a card opens the product page in a new tab.
{count} product card(s) — from the design — how many cards the row holds. This is a fact, not a setting (see Number of cards).
the card list — one row per card, with its picture, name, and price. Click a row to edit the card.
1. Manual (fixed products)
Use this mode when you want to decide exactly which products the popup shows — for example, a category you are clearing from stock, or the three products the campaign's offer is about. This is the mode every freshly built popup starts in.
Select Manual (fixed products) under Mode (it is already selected on a new build).
Click a card in the list. The Product {n} dialog opens.
If OptiMonk has a cached catalog for this domain, the top of the dialog shows From the store's catalog with a Search product… box. Click a product and it fills the card's fields. If there is no cached catalog, you see: No cached catalog for this domain — fill the card's fields in by hand below.
Check or overwrite the fields below:
Field What it is Name The product name on the card Price The price Original price The struck-through "before" price SKU The product code Button label The text on the card's CTA button Image URL The product picture Product page URL Where the card links to Click Save (or Cancel to drop the changes).
A field marked — not laid out by the design is greyed out. That means the design did not place that role on the card (no old price on the card, say), so there is nowhere to put the value. If you want a field the design left out, ask for it in chat and the popup is rebuilt with it.
2. The dynamic modes
Four modes fill the cards live, per visitor, from your store's own data:
Most viewed — your store's most viewed products.
Last visited — the products this visitor looked at, so they can carry on where they left off.
Products in the cart — what the visitor already has in their cart. Useful for exit reminders and cart abandonment.
Smart recommendation — the store platform's own recommendation engine picks the products.
Each one has its own article; the important shared rule is below.
The dynamic modes need your store connected
In the Mode dropdown, the four dynamic modes are greyed out with the hint store needed until your store is connected to OptiMonk. Under the dropdown, the panel says:
The dynamic modes need your store connected to OptiMonk. Why?
Opening Why? explains it:
Most viewed, Last visited, Products in the cart, and Smart recommendation each pick the products live, from your store's own data. Without that connection, the popup would have nothing to fill the cards with, and OptiMonk hides the whole campaign rather than showing empty ones.
Connect the store in the OptiMonk admin under Settings → Insert code: pick your platform there (Shopify, Shoprenter, WooCommerce, Unas, Gomag, MerchantPro) and finish the connection — on Shopify, it happens by installing the OptiMonk app. The separate Integrations page is for e-mail/marketing tools, not for the store. Once connected, these modes become selectable here and the cards fill themselves.
You can do the same connection here in the app: open Settings → Domains, find your domain, and click Connection guide. The guide walks you through your platform:
Shopify — install the OptiMonk app, then turn on the OptiMonk app embed on your theme.
WooCommerce — connect with one click, or enter the consumer key and secret by hand.
Unas / Gomag / MerchantPro — the guide ends with an API key field; OptiMonk needs that key to read your catalog.
Other platforms — the snippet only. Connecting the catalog needs one of the platforms above.
Once the connection is live, the greyed-out modes become selectable, and the hint under the dropdown disappears.
💡 The popup only shows products your store actually has in stock. If the mode cannot produce enough products to fill every card, OptiMonk hides the campaign rather than showing empty cards.
Number of cards
The card count comes from the design, not from a setting — the panel says so: {count} product card(s) — from the design. There is no "show 1–5 products" dropdown, because the number of cards and the number of product slots in the HTML have to match exactly; a mismatch would hide the campaign.
To change it, ask in chat — for example, "make it two products instead of three" — and the popup is rebuilt with the new row.
If the panel ever shows this warning, the two numbers have drifted apart:
The settings declare {declared} products but the row holds {actual}. The build writes the real count back on the next change; a mismatch would hide the campaign.
Making any change in the panel writes the real count back and clears it.
What is different from the classic admin
If you know product recommendations from the classic OptiMonk admin, three things have moved:
No template picking. There is no New campaign → Increase sales → Use this template route; the agent designs the popup from your brief.
No "most popular of" sub-options. The classic admin let you scope Most popular to the whole store, one given category, or each category page — and the last of those added a Current category page targeting condition for you. Popups built here always use the whole store, and no targeting condition is added automatically. If you want the popup to run only on one collection, add a Current page / URL rule yourself on the campaign's Settings tab.
No Teaser page. There is no teaser to edit after saving; you press Save (or Save & Exit) and you are done.
Embedded content is not a campaign format in this app either — popups here are card or fullscreen.