User Guide - How to add the recommendation widget to your BigCommerce site

Home Page

To add the recommendation widget to home page, we can either use

  • marketing banners
  • or editing theme files (Advanced).

  1. Go to BigCommerce Admin Panel -> Marketing -> Banners
  2. Click on "Create Banner" button to create a banner. Or if you have existing banner that you want to use for embedding the widget, click on the existing banner to edit.
  3. Enter the any banner name you want. In here we use "Demo RecCommerce Widget" as the banner name. The banner name is for your reference only and will not be shown on your website.
  4. In the Banner Content field, we want to insert the widget HTML snippet.
    • First, click on the "HTML" icon on the banner content to switch to the "Edit HTML Source" mode. The "HTML Source Editor" will pop up.
    • Second, copy the widget HTML snippet and paste it into the desired place in the HTML Source Editor. The recommendation widget will be rendered at the same that you put the widget HTML snippet on your website. Optionally, if you have other contents to be displayed in this marketing banner, you can add those HTML content around the widget HTML snippet.
    • Click on update button on the HTML Source Editor to finish editing the HTML.
      Note: The recommendation widget will only render on your actual website. It is normal that you see a blank banner content field after you added the HTML snippet:
  5. Choose "Home Page" for "Show on Page" and choose either "Top of Page" or "Bottom of Page" for the "Location":
  6. Click on "Save" button to save the marketing banner.
  7. Now go to your home page of your website. VoilĂ , the recommendation widget shows up on the home page!

Note: If you are theme developer, skip this tutorial and use your local stencil development environment to insert the widget HTML snippet . Otherwise, please continue reading.

  1. Go to BigCommerce Admin Panel -> Storefront -> My Themes
  2. Under "Current Theme" section, click on Advanced -> Edit Theme Files to open the Stencil Theme Editor in a new window.

    Note: if you are using a out of the box BigCommerce theme, you may not see the "Edit Theme Files" option. You will need to click on "Make a Copy" first to make a copy of your theme, then apply the theme copy as your current theme in order to edit the theme files. See BigCommerce official document for details.
  3. On the left side of the Stencil Theme Editor, click on templates -> pages -> home.html to open the home page html template. Note: the files layout and content may vary based on different themes.
  4. In the home.html file, add the widget HTML snippet at the desired place. See this  for how to edit the theme file.
  5. Click on "Save & apply file" to save your changes. It may take several minutes to save and apply the changes to your store website.
  6. Now go to your home page of your website. VoilĂ , the recommendation widget shows up on the home page!