Setting up related products recommendations using the Related Products – Product Recommendations for WooCommerce plugin helps you create personalized product suggestions that align with your business goals. With features like custom sorting, slider layouts, shortcode placement, and advanced exclusion controls, this plugin ensures that recommendations are relevant and impactful for your customers.
Follow these steps to optimize your Related Products Recommendations for WooCommerce and enhance your cross-sell strategy.
Step 1: Install and Access the Plugin
- Install the Related Products – Product Recommendations plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.
- From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce > Related Products to access the plugin settings.
Step 2: Choose the Best Working Mode
When setting up product recommendations, it’s important to select the right mode that matches your business needs:
- Custom Related Products (Recommended): Gives you full control over which products to recommend and how they appear.
- Default WooCommerce Mode: Suitable if you’re looking for basic recommendations with minimal setup.
- Disable Recommendations: If related products aren’t relevant to your strategy, you can turn them off entirely.
Pro Tip: We recommend starting with the Custom Related Products mode for the most flexibility.
Step 3: Select a recommendation title
A catchy title is always a plus point for a recommendation. Under the Related products title, set a title for your recommendation, such as “You may also like“ or “Have a look at this. “
Step 4: Define Your Product Recommendation Strategy
Effective recommendations depend on how products are grouped and sorted. In the plugin’s General Settings, you’ll find key options to fine-tune recommendations:
- Source of Recommendations: You can choose to show products from the same category, tag, or both. For example, a T-shirt might show other T-shirts or related apparel items.
- Sorting Options: Decide whether to prioritize recommendations by popularity, price, created date, updated date, and more. For cross-sells, sorting by price can encourage customers to explore affordable add-ons.
- Once the sort condition is selected, choose an order for the products to display, ascending or descending. For example, Products are sorted based on price from low to high.
The plugin now offers a “Relevance” sorting option, designed to improve the product recommendations by prioritizing products from the same subcategory as the currently viewed item.
What it does:
When Relevance is selected from the Sort by dropdown:
- Related products will be pulled first from the same subcategory.
- If the subcategory doesn’t have enough products to fill the widget, items from the parent category will be used as a fallback.
- For the Relevance sorting logic to work properly, the “Same category” option under “Display related products from” must be enabled.
This ensures customers see the most contextually relevant suggestions based on their current viewing behavior.
Example:
Imagine you have this category structure:
- Men → Shirt (subcategories: Polo, Formal)
- Men → Pants
By default, if a customer is viewing a product from the Polo category, WooCommerce might also recommend items from Formal shirts (Both are in the Shirts category).
However, when Relevance is selected, the plugin will first prioritize Polo shirts. Products from the parent category (Shirt) will only be displayed if there aren’t enough items in the Polo subcategory to fill the recommendation section.
Use Case: If your goal is to promote high-margin products, sort recommendations by popularity or price (descending).
Step 5: Hide recommendations for selected products
If you want to hide the recommendation for a few selected products or categories, you can select those products and categories under respective options. For more info, refer to Hide Related Products for Selected Products or Categories.
Step 6: Optimize the Layout for Better Engagement
How recommendations appear plays a significant role in customer engagement. You can configure the layout to suit your store’s design.
- Grid vs. Slider View: Choose between a traditional grid and a sleek slider. Sliders are great for mobile users and make the section feel less crowded. The grid is the default one; enable the slider to override.
- Adjusting the Product Count: Set the number of products visible per row or slide. You can also define different counts for desktop, tablet, and mobile.
- You can adjust the width and slider arrow settings to fine-tune your recommendation.
Pro Tip: Using a slider with 4 products per slide works well for most desktop views, while 2-3 products fit better on mobile screens.
Step 7: Exclude Irrelevant Products
Recommendations work best when they’re relevant. Use the exclusion settings to hide Out-of-stock or back-order products.
Enhance Recommendations with Product-Level Customization
For more tailored recommendations, you can override global settings at the product level:
- Open any product from Products > All Products.
- Under Product Data > Linked Products, select any product from the store as recommended.
- Save the product to apply the changes.
Use Case: If a product has accessories or add-ons (like a camera with a case or tripod), adding specific cross-sells can increase the likelihood of bundle purchases.
Add Recommendations Anywhere Using Shortcodes
The plugin also offers flexibility with shortcodes. You can insert recommendations in blogs, product descriptions, or any custom page with:
[wt-related-products product_id="XX"]
Replace XX with the product’s ID.
Idea: Use this shortcode to recommend related products in a product’s detailed description section or product-related blog for better visibility.
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