Building Strategies Aftersell

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Overview

The Aftersell dashboard provides a visual interface for building and managing Strategies. You can create strategies, define targeting rules with triggers, assign products to recommend, and configure catch all behavior — all without writing any code. This guide walks through the end-to-end process of creating a Strategy in the UI.

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Navigating to Strategies

1. Log in to Aftersell.
2. Click Strategies in the left sidebar navigation.
3. You’ll see a list of your existing Strategies, or an empty state prompting you to create your first one.

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Creating a New Strategy

1. Click Add Strategy.
2. You’ll be taken to the Strategy editor where you can add rules.

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Adding Rules

Each Strategy contains one or more rules. A rule consists of:

• Triggers — the “when” — criteria that must be met for the rule to match.
• Actions — the “then” — the experience returned when the rule matches.

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Defining triggers

Triggers determine when a rule fires. You may combine up to two triggers using AND or OR logic. Available trigger types include:

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Product triggers

Target based on what’s in the shopper’s cart or what they’re viewing:

• Product ID — matches specific Shopify products
• Product type — matches the product type field (e.g., “Apparel”, “Electronics”)
• Product vendor — matches the vendor/brand name
• Product tags — matches products with specific tags (e.g., “sale”, “summer”)
• Product collections — matches products belonging to specific collections
• Product handle — matches the product URL slug
• Selling plan — matches “subscription” or “one-time” products
• Product metafields — matches on custom metafield namespace/key/value pairs

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Cart triggers

Target based on the overall cart state:

• Cart subtotal — e.g., subtotal greater than $50
• Cart item count — total quantity of items in the cart
• Cart line count — number of distinct line items
• Cart attributes — custom cart attributes set via Shopify’s cart API
• Cart notes — the cart note field

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Customer triggers

Target based on who the shopper is:

• Customer tags — e.g., “VIP”, “loyalty-gold”
• Country / province — billing location
• Locale — customer locale (e.g., “en-US”)
• Order count — number of previous orders
• Total spent — lifetime spend
• Accepts marketing — marketing opt-in status

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Session & UTM triggers

Target based on how the shopper arrived or session attributes:

• UTM source / medium / campaign / content / term — attribution parameters
• Currency code — store currency
• Shipping country / province — shipping destination
• Shipping method — selected shipping method

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Operators

Each trigger uses an operator to define how the value is matched. The operators available depend on the trigger type. Not all operators are available for every trigger — for example, numeric operators apply to cart subtotal and order count, while list operators like Is in and Contains all are most commonly used with tags and collections.

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Defining Actions

Actions create the experience you want to deliver to the customer. This is where you decide what products to surface, how to surface them, and any additional data to pass alongside them. A rule can have multiple actions configured together to build out the full experience. Per rule, all configured actions contribute to one combined pool. For example, a rule with a specific product action, a collection action, and a tag-based action will return products from all three sources together. If a product matches multiple sources, it is deduplicated.

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Product actions

The same product attributes available on the trigger side are also available when defining actions. You can return products based on:

• Specific products — hand-pick individual products from your Shopify catalog.
• Collection — return all products belonging to a specific collection.
• Product attributes — return products matching criteria like tags, vendor, product type, or metafields — the same attribute types used in triggers.

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Dynamic actions

Dynamic actions change what is returned based on real-time session data or store-wide signals. Available dynamic action types include:

• Recently purchased — products recently purchased (by other customers).
• Top sellers — your store’s best-performing products by sales volume.
• AI recommendations — personalized suggestions generated by Aftersell’s recommendation model.

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Filtering actions

Once the product pool is assembled, you can configure how many products are returned and in what order:

• Sort — control which products are selected:
  • Random — a random selection.
  • Highest price first — most expensive products are returned first.
  • Lowest price first — least expensive products are returned first.
• Amount/Limit — set the maximum number of products to return.

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Key-value actions

Optionally, attach key-value pairs to a rule. When the rule matches, these are returned in meta.data in the API response alongside the product results. Common uses include:

• Promotional banner text
• Campaign labels for analytics

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Rule Priority and Evaluation Order

Rules within a Strategy are evaluated in hierchal, sequential steps. Step 1 will be evaluated first, and so on. You can reorder rules by dragging and dropping them in the Strategy editor. The evaluation engine:

1. Evaluates each rule’s triggers against the provided context.
2. Collects products from all matching rules.
3. Deduplicates and limits the result to the configured maximum (default: 20 products).

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Configuring a Catch all

Catch all is a special rule that acts as the final step in every Strategy evaluation. It has no trigger, it fires automatically if no other rule in the Strategy matches the current request. When enabled, the Catch all ensures your recommendation slot is never empty. Its action can be configured using any of the same action types available to regular rules — specific products, collections, dynamic actions, etc.

• Enable/disable — toggle the Catch all rule on or off for the Strategy. When disabled, requests that match no rules will return empty.
• Configure actions — define what to return using any combination of available action types, the same as any other rule.

When the Catch all fires, the API response will indicate resolution.fallbackUsed: true.

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Global Filters

Global filters apply across every rule in a Strategy. Any product removed by a global filter will be excluded from results regardless of which rule matched. You can access global filters via the filter icon next to the strategy name pencil at the top left of the Strategy editor. Available global filters:

• Out of stock products — automatically exclude any product that is currently unavailable for purchase.
• Input products — exclude the product(s) that triggered the rule (e.g., the product a shopper is currently viewing on a PDP), so you never recommend the same product the shopper is already looking at.
• Product attributes — exclude products matching specific attributes such as tags, vendor, product type, collection, or metafields.

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Validation and Error States

A Strategy cannot be saved if any rule is incomplete. If a rule is missing a trigger, an action, or both, errors will appear directly on the rule in question highlighting what needs to be resolved. To clear the error and save the Strategy, either:

• Complete the rule — add the missing trigger and/or action.
• Delete the rule — remove it entirely if it is no longer needed.

The Strategy editor will not allow saving until all rules are valid.