A novel composite material, MoS2/Bi2WO6, has been fabricated via a facile two-step approach. The few layered MoS2 as a cocatalyst has intimate interactions with the hierarchical flower-like Bi2WO6 microspheres, which boosts the visible light harvesting and charge transferring, and promotes the separation of electron-hole pairs, thus leading to the superior photocatalytic activity. It was found that the as-synthesized MoS2/Bi2WO6 nanocomposites exhibited significantly enhanced performance for the photoreduction of CO2 into hydrocarbons, i.e. methanol and ethanol, as compared with pure Bi2WO6. The yields of methanol and ethanol obtained over the composite with optimal content of MoS2 (0.4 wt%) were 36.7 and 36.6 mu mol gcat(-1) after 4 h of visible light irradiation, respectively, which were 1.94 times higher than that over pure Bi2WO6. Furthermore, the mechanism of CO2 photoreduction was also investigated. It indicates that the CO32-, HCO3- and H2CO3 generated in CO2 aqueous solution would be the reactive substrates during the photoreduction reaction, proving the thermodynamic feasibility of CO2 photoreduction. This work demonstrated that MoS2 is a very promising candidate for development of highly active photocatalysts, and supplied a facile and simple strategy for designing environmentally benign, cheap non-noble metal, and highly efficient semiconductor composites. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.