How to Suggest Products on WooCommerce? (A Complete Guide)

Implementing WooCommerce product suggestions can help increase your average order value and sales. In this guide, you’ll learn how to configure WooCommerce recommended products, explore various product recommendation types, and follow a setup guide using the WebToffee’s WooCommerce recommendation engine.

While it may seem trivial, product suggestions hold immense potential as a revenue driver for eCommerce businesses. Not only are they cost-effective (aside from the tool you need to create recommendations), but they also offer convenience—again, if you have the right tool in place!

WooCommerce product recommendations are systems that suggest products to users browsing your store. When customers visit your store to make a purchase or even casually browse, you can recommend alternative WooCommerce products or engage them in upselling and cross-selling. This might even help them discover products that better align with their initial search.

Successfully implementing product recommendations in your WooCommerce store can improve customer dwell time and drive engagement thereby increasing the average order value. The important thing to note here is to ensure that the product recommendations are relevant and add value to the customer’s shopping experience.

The core aim of investing in a WooCommerce recommendation engine is to entice customers to purchase more. As mentioned earlier, when customers add additional products, cart value and revenue increase. Moreover, WooCommerce product recommendations can improve the visibility of slow-moving items or products that haven’t yet been discovered by your customers.

Likewise, product suggestions are mutually beneficial for your customers. Personalized product suggestions based on unique interests and searches improve their overall shopping journey.

Now, let’s explore the different techniques to recommend WooCommerce products in your store.

eCommerce product recommendations can be of several types. Some common types of WooCommerce product recommendations include,

• Upsells
• Cross-sells
• Down-sells
• Frequently bought together
• Related products
• Bestsellers
• Top-rated
• New arrivals
• Recently viewed

Let’s take a scenario to understand this better.

The freshness of the products is one of the major factors influencing the customers’ purchase decisions. Customers appreciate discovering new products they haven’t seen before when visiting your store.

This is especially true in the case of fast-fashion businesses, where the core model relies on the idea that customers will return to discover trending products.

So, by offering something new with each visit, you can capture the attention of users seeking trendy, high-demand items. In order to showcase your most recent products in your online store, you may set up a “New Arrivals” product recommendation. These recommendation widgets should display the products added in the last few days, weeks, or months, sorted by the latest-product-first-format to improve their relevancy.

This is how you can typically create product suggestions for each case. In the next section, we will explore how to recommend products in WooCommerce, both with and without a plugin.

WooCommerce, by default, automatically recommends WooCommerce products related by product category. However, you can also create custom upsell and cross-sell options for individual products using its built-in features.

Steps to configure upsells and cross-sells in WooCommerce:

• Go to WooCommerce > Products and select the specific product you want to add as an upsell or cross-sell.
• In the Product Data panel, select the Linked Products tab.
• Add the product you wish to link to by searching for it and click on Update to save changes.

The configured upsells and cross-sells will be displayed below the product data, while related products from the same category, such as “Women,” are shown randomly.

A significant drawback of the default WooCommerce option is the lack of control over what is displayed. Also, manually adding upsells and cross-sells for each product takes too much time.

You can set up advanced product recommendations for WooCommerce with the WebToffee WooCommerce product recommendations plugin. It lets you create multiple types of product suggestions including, Bestsellers, Frequently Bought Together, Related Products and custom recommendations.

Steps to configure WooCommerce recommended products using the recommendation plugin:

Prerequisite

• Install and activate the product recommendations plugin
• Navigate to the product recommendations settings WooCommerce > Product Recommendations on the WordPress admin panel. Click on Create Recommendation.

Step 1: Select Where to Display WooCommerce Recommendations

You will be able to see several pre-build campaigns in the Product Recommendations pane. Start by selecting where you want the recommended products to appear. For this guide, we’ll choose the single product page. Options include single product pages, category pages, the shop page, cart page, checkout page, and more.

The pre-built recommendation campaigns displayed depend on the page you select. For instance, if you choose the cart page to showcase your suggested products, only campaigns configured for that page will appear. These include Did You Forget These?, Frequently Bought Together, Related Products, Similar Products, and Custom Recommendations.

Step 2: Building a WooCommerce Product Recommendation Campaign

• To build a custom campaign, click on the option Create your own product recommendation. You may also choose a pre-build campaign template that you see fit.

Step 3: Configuring the WooCommerce Products to Be Recommended

• On the recommendation edit page, choose what to display as the title of the recommendation widget.

• Next, choose the Products to be recommended. Utilize the available filters, such as category, tag, on sale, and relative price, to configure your selections. You can apply multiple filters simultaneously to narrow down the products that are most relevant to your specific needs.

• You can determine when users see recommended products in your store by using conditional filters. This feature allows you to specify the exact conditions under which WooCommerce product suggestions are displayed.

For example, the recommendations can be configured to appear only when a customer is viewing a product from the “Mens” category and the “Shirts” subcategory. Also, these suggestions will be shown only if the user is a “Customer.”

• Next, use the Sort products by option to arrange the order in which the products are to be displayed.

• You can determine the placement of the recommendations widget and customize other settings in the Visual Preferences options. A Visual Guide is available to preview any changes you make. Additionally, you can specify both the number of products displayed per page and the total number of products shown in the WooCommerce Product Recommendation widget.

• Click on Create Recommendation once you are done with the configurations.

Step 4: Customize the Product Recommendations Widget

You can further customize the WooCommerce product recommendation widget here.

1. Go to WooCommerce > Product Recommendations > General Settings.
2. Select the display type as either Grid or Slider.
3. If the slider is selected, specify whether to enable products to be looped inside the slider with the option Enable loop slider.
4. Specify the Number of recommended products to show per page on desktop, mobile, and tablet.
5. Input the total number of products in the slider or grid.
6. Specify the title alignment.
7. Pick the color of the recommendation title.
8. Enable the Hide out-of-stock products from the recommendations list.
9. Update the settings.

That’s pretty much it. You have successfully created custom WooCommerce recommendations using a plugin. Now, let’s briefly go through the built-in product recommendation templates available in this advanced recommendation plugin for WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce product recommendation plugin offers several pre-built recommendation campaign templates. It includes,

• Related Products
• Frequently Bought Together
• Bestsellers
• New Arrivals
• Top Rated
• Recently Viewed and more

The core configurations of these built-in recommendations are already set in the template.

Just click on the template, review the recommendation settings, add or edit the changes you want to make, and create the recommendation. Thats it! Generating product suggestions from pre-built recommendation templates is as easy as that.

For example, to display the best-selling products in each category on the respective category page with a pre-built template. Follow these steps:

• First, go to WooCommerce > Product Recommendations and click on the template Bestsellers.
• As per the template, the recommendation slider will have the title “Bestsellers in the category name“. It will be displayed above the products on the category pages of your store. The recommended products will be in the “currently viewed” category and will be displayed in the decreasing order of their popularity (popularity is calculated based on the number of purchases).

• Add additional configurations or make any changes to the current one if required and click on Create recommendation. This will generate the bestseller recommendations instantaneously.

Let’s choose some examples of WooCommerce product recommendations that this plugin can set up to understand better.

Upsell

WooCommerce product upsells suggest items priced higher than the currently viewed product.

The core aim of upsell recommendations is to entice customers to purchase higher-priced or higher-valued products. This could improve the overall revenue of the business.

Usually, upsells are suggested on the respective product pages.

Configure the following settings in the Create your own recommendations tab within the WooCommerce Recommended Products plugin:

• Display recommendations on: Product page

• Position of recommendation: Below product meta

• Products to be recommended:
  • Current product’s category – any (recommend products belonging to the same category)
  • Current product’s tag – any (recommend products with the same tag)
  • Current products attribute – in – select an attribute (recommend products having the same attribute values)
  • Relative price – greater than – x% (recommend products whose price is between 100% and (100+x)% of the current product)
• Sort products by: Randomize

Only the products satisfying all the set conditions would be recommended.

Cross-Sells

Cross-sells are products that have almost similar properties to the current product.

For example, a person looking for a white T-shirt may need to check the product offered by different brands. Identifying such similar products and showcasing them in the store so as to make it easy for your customers is known as cross-selling.

Cross-sells are usually displayed on the product page itself.

Configure the following settings in the Create your own recommendations tab to dynamically generate cross-sells for your products.

• Display recommendations on: Cart page

• Position of recommendation: Below cart table

• Products to be recommended:
  • Current product’s category – any (recommend products belonging to the same category as the products in the cart)
  • Current product’s tag – any (recommend products with the same tag as the products in the cart)
• Sort products by: Popularity – high to low

Products On Sale

Discounts are one of the most influential factors when it comes to purchasing.

Recommending the products you offer at a discount on the shop page will encourage your customers to purchase them. In this case, let’s direct such recommendations to non-logged-in users to encourage them to log in or sign up.

Configure the following settings in the Create your own recommendations tab to set up such a recommendation widget on your store.

• Display recommendations on: Shop page

• Position on page: Above products

• Products to be recommended: On sale – yes (Showcase products that are on sale)

• Display Criteria: User – is a guest

• Sort products by: Rating – high to low

Adding recommended products to your WooCommerce store can significantly impact your revenue and customer engagement. You can encourage customers to increase their average cart value by suggesting relevant products to them.

To set up recommended products in WooCommerce, you can use the WebToffee WooCommerce product recommendation plugin. This plugin allows you to customize the recommendation widgets and display the suggested products in a format that suits your store’s needs.

Incorporating recommended products into your WooCommerce store is an excellent way to improve your customer experience and increase revenue. With the right plugin and a recommendation strategy, you can take advantage of the many benefits that product recommendations offer.