Create Amazon-like Frequently Bought Together Products in WooCommerce: An Easy Guide

Displaying the right products at the right time can significantly boost product discovery and sales. In this guide, we’ll explore how to recommend frequently bought together products in WooCommerce using the WebToffee’s FBT plugin.

WooCommerce provides quite a few opportunities to boost sales, and if you are not making the most of these features, then you might be missing out on its true revenue potential. The frequently bought together recommendations feature is one such opportunity that would enable store owners to make considerable progress with minimum effort.

These product purchase recommendations rank amongst the most impactful marketing strategies to max out your ROI for in-house product marketing.

Frequently bought together, as the name suggests, refers to a group of products that are often purchased together by customers. For instance, if someone buys a phone, he might also purchase a phone case and screen protector.

Amazon, for example, suggests related products in order to encourage customers to add more items in their cart. So, recommending such complementary products or bundles as frequently bought together would help you remind your customers of the products that they might need. It also helps you boost your sales and profits. 

How to Recommend Frequently Bought Products to Your WooCommerce Store?

WooCommerce, by default, doesn’t include a feature to recommend products frequently bought together. You will need external assistance from third-party plugins to add the ‘buy together’ or ‘frequently bought together’ feature to your WooCommerce store. 

The Frequently Bought Together for WooCommerce is an excellent tool from WebToffee with which you can set up a ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ section with ease. This robust plugin houses almost all the features and customizations that you may require to set up a Frequently Bought Together widget on your product pages. 

Now, let’s look into creating the Frequently Bought Together recommendations in WooCommerce.

Step 1: Install And Activate the WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together Plugin

As always, the first step is to install and activate the plugin that facilitates the FBT functionality in WooCommerce.

• First, download the plugin’s .zip file
• Go to WebToffee > My account > Download
• Next, in the WordPress admin console, navigate to Plugins > Add New
• Click on Upload plugin
• Once uploaded, click on Activate

Step 2: Configure The WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together General Settings

To set up the plugin configurations,

• Go to WooCommerce > Frequently Bought Together > General Settings.
• Toggle on the option Enable frequently bought together. This adds an additional widget named ‘Frequently Bought Together’ to your individual product pages.
• If you want to automate recommending frequently bought together bundles, enable the Suggest products automatically. When enabled, the algorithm analyzes sales data to suggest products commonly purchased together. If you’ve set up custom recommendations, it will override these auto-generated suggestions. For this example, let’s keep it disabled.
• Under Suggest products from select the source for the WooCommerce frequently bought together recommendations. You can choose from Upsells, Cross sells or Related Products (configured using WebToffee’s related products plugin for WooCommerce). The plugin checks pre-configured upsells, cross-sells, or related products and suggests them. This is especially useful if you haven’t set custom products or if there are no commonly purchased products for a specific item.

• Next, choose how many products you want to add to the new recommendations widget. You can either display all the products that you have added as recommendations or choose up to ‘X’ number of products. Let’s select 3 here.
• Keep the option Show ‘this product’ enabled. If disabled, the product for which the frequently bought together recommendations are displaying will not be added to the recommendations widget. When added the currently viewing product will display under the banner ‘this product’.
• Keep the option Allow unchecking ‘this product’ ticked if you want your users to have the option to unselect the currently viewing product while adding the frequently bought recommendations to the cart.
• Select Yes under the option Keep the default state of products as checked if you want all the products in the frequently bought together widget to be automatically selected and ready to be added to the cart. If disabled, users will have to manually select the products that they want to add to the cart. Note that, even if this option is enabled, users can manually unselect products that they do not require. 
• Set the Behavior on clicking individual products as Open in new tab, Open in same tab, or None. If ‘Open in a new tab’ is selected, the product in the frequently bought together widget opens up in a new tab when a customer clicks on it. Choose None if you do not wish to redirect them to product pages. Let’s keep it as ‘Open in new tab.’
• Check the box corresponding to Hide unavailable products to hide the out-of-stock products in the frequently bought together suggestions.

Step 3: Frequently Bought Together Display and Text Settings

In the display settings, you can customize the layout of your frequently bought together product recommendation widget. You can choose between a Table view, List view, or Gallery view. For now, let’s select the List view.

Next, configure the Display fields that you want to include in the FBT widget and set its Position. You can place the widget above or below the summary, below the product meta, or the related products section.

• Next, you can customize the texts available in the FBT widgets. Let’s change the name of the section title to ‘Customers also bought.’ 
• Let’s keep all the other settings the same. Click on Save Settings.

These are all the configurations that you can set up using this WebToffee plugin. Note that this alone will not add the frequently bought together section to your store.

You will now have to configure the product recommendations for each individual product in your store to add them to their frequently bought together section. If you have selected upsells, cross-sells, or related products, the frequently bought together plugin would automatically use the products added in the respective fields as recommendations. Now, let’s look into setting up custom FBT product recommendations.

Step 4: Create Custom Product Recommendations

You will have to repeat this step on all products for which frequently bought together recommendations should be set up.

To configure custom ‘Customer Also Bought’ recommendations in WooCommerce,

• Go to the Set custom products tab to start creating custom frequently bought together product bundles. Select the product for which you want to add FBT by clicking Edit. If you’re setting this up for a new product, click Add.
• In the Linked products section, choose which additional products to show as frequently bought together. These will appear on the specific product page, encouraging customers to add more items to their cart.
• Enable the Discount Type feature to set up product bundle discounts. You can offer a percentage-based discount or a fixed cart discount when these products are bought together. Set the discount value.

• Once you’ve set up the bundle, enable the Status option to activate your custom product bundle recommendations.
• Click on Save to update the changes.

The customers when visiting the product page can see the frequently bought together section – named ‘Customers also bought’. The widget will be located above the summary and will contain up to a maximum of 4 products, displayed randomly. When a customer clicks on each product, that product will open up in a new tab (as configured).

This is how the frequently bought together product recommendations with a list view layout would look like:

When the customer clicks on Add all to cart, all the products will get added to the cart. Also, the discount will get automatically reduced from the cart subtotal.

Yes, it is true that there are hundreds of WooCommerce product recommendation plugins which would help you drive the discovery of your store products. However, just keep in mind that overdoing recommendations could also do harm. So, our suggestion is to go with the most powerful recommendation tools such as frequently bought together and related product suggestions. 

The WooCommerce product bundles plugin helps you give out intelligent and smart product recommendations. It enables you to implement frequently bought together bundle discounts in WooCommerce to ensure that your customers go ahead with the purchase. 

Hope this article was of interest to you. Do let us know what you think in the comments.