What sells together
The till can offer a second item after a scan — the bag of crisps that always goes out with the sandwich. There are two ways to decide what it offers, they are different buttons, and the difference matters to your shop's money.
The two buttons
| Analyze what sells together | Suggest pairings | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Top of the Catalog screen | On one product, in Often bought with |
| Where the answer comes from | Your own completed sales | A language model, choosing from what you stock |
| How long | Instant — a database query | A few seconds; it waits on somebody else's server |
| Cost | Nothing | One model call, billed to your provider account |
| Writes straight away | Yes, for every product at once | No — it proposes, you accept |
Counting your own receipts is the better answer and the free one, so start there. Asking a model fills the one gap counting cannot: a shop that has not sold anything yet has no receipts to count.
Counting your own receipts
- Open Catalog.
- Press Analyze what sells together at the top of the page. The button reads Analyzing… while it works.
- Read the sentence it leaves behind.
It looks at every completed sale in this store from the last 180 days, finds products that appear on the same receipt, and keeps a pair once it has happened at least twice. Each product keeps its four strongest partners.
When it worked, the sentence is a count: Read 412 sales from the last 180 days — 37 products now suggest something at the till.
A new shop gets No completed sales in the last 180 days, so there is nothing to learn from yet. A shop whose customers buy one thing at a time gets 28 sales examined, but no two products were bought together 2 times or more. Both are real answers. Nothing is invented to fill the silence, because a made-up pairing on a till is a cashier offering a customer something nobody ever bought.
Run it again whenever you want the numbers refreshed — after a season changes, or after a range moves. Each run replaces the previous counted pairs, so a pairing that has stopped happening stops being offered. Pairs you chose yourself are left alone.
Asking a model for pairings
- Open Catalog and open the product you want to pair.
- Find the Often bought with panel and press Suggest pairings.
- A window opens and shows the three stages as they happen: Reading your catalogue, Asking the model, Checking against your shelves — each with the real time it took.
- Each proposal has Accept and Dismiss. Nothing is saved until you press Accept.
The model is handed the products this store actually stocks — up to sixty of them, the ones that have moved most in the last 90 days — and told to choose only from that list. Anything it names that you do not sell is dropped, and the window says so: Left out because you do not stock them: …. You get at most five proposals, each with one sentence saying why.
Products already paired with this one are kept out of the list before the model sees them, so it never offers you something you have.
Asking the model is a call to your AI provider, billed to you, and it only runs when somebody presses the button — never during a sale. If the provider is rate-limited, refuses the key, or does not answer within twenty seconds, you get a plain sentence saying so and nothing on the product is changed. Press it again.
If no model is configured, the window says so, skips the asking stage entirely — nothing is asked and nothing is spent — and shows a few sample rows drawn from your own best sellers, so you can see how accepting works. They are labelled as samples and carry no reason. See Email, SMS & keys for setting a key.
Pairing two products by hand
You already know things the receipts do not. If you moved the jam next to the bread this morning, no sale has proved it yet.
- Open the product and find Often bought with.
- Use the Pair with search box at the bottom of the panel — type a name, pick the product.
- It appears in the list straight away.
A hand-made pairing goes one way. Pairing ink with a printer offers ink to somebody buying a printer, and not the other way round — which is usually what you meant. Do it twice if you want both.
Two things are refused, each in a sentence naming the products: pairing a product with itself, and adding a pair that is already on the list.
Where each pairing came from
Every row in Often bought with says who decided it:
- You paired these — added by hand.
- Suggested by AI, accepted by you — a model proposed it and somebody agreed. The model's proposal on its own never wrote anything.
- On 6 of the same receipts — counted from your sales. These rows are marked From sales and have no Remove button.
It is not a decision, it is a reading of what your customers did. Deleting it would change nothing: the next time you press Analyze what sells together it would be counted straight back. It clears itself when customers stop buying the two things together. The two kinds you chose yourself — by hand, or by accepting a proposal — both have Remove.
What the cashier sees
Scan an item at the retail till and a strip appears under the ticket reading Often bought with, followed by up to two product names as buttons. Tap one to add it to the sale.
If the scanned item has no pairings, nothing appears at all — no empty box, no "no suggestions". The till reads the stored answer, so the strip appears instantly and no model is asked during a sale.
Who can do this
Both buttons need the right to change the catalog. Counting rewrites the stored suggestions for the whole store; asking a model spends the owner's money and is the first move of a merchandising decision. A cashier can see the results at the till but cannot start either job. See Roles & permissions.