Running a successful eCommerce business means paving ways for the end customers to shop more. If you run an online store, it feels good when you see customers adding more items to their carts next to buying what they wanted. Convincing them to do that can be hard as you have to maintain the subtle difference between what is acceptable and what is annoying to the buyers.
If you want to know how it is possible, watch how the eCommerce behemoth, Amazon gets it done. It has an intelligent product recommendation engine built to let the customers see more than what they want. Over time, the engine has worked considerably for Amazon as it witnessed an increase in sales.
Hence, your WooCommerce store also needs an integrated product recommendation feature in the contemporary customer-centric era. Before moving on to how you can make it done, let’s talk about why you need it.
Why Your WooCommerce Store Must Show Intelligent Product Recommendations?
Help Your Customers
At times, the customers forget to think of all the products they want to shop online at a store. So, they prefer starting with just a few of the items on their list. Helping them find more products related to what they are buying can attract their attention on your site, keeping them engaged for more time. Also, by showcasing various related or complementary products, you can maximize the chances that a customer will buy more from your online store.
Increase Order Value
If you dig deeper into the Customer Per Acquisition (CPC), you will find out that you can sell more products to current customers at low CPC than acquiring new ones. With product recommendations, increasing Average Order Value (AOV) can also be increased, thus boosting the total sales on your site.
Make the Most of Existing Customers
For business sustenance, retaining existing customers is as important as acquiring new ones. Another advantage of personalized product recommendation is that it helps in retaining old customers and boosts the rate at which repeat orders are placed. This can be done by suggesting products that a user will most likely to buy based on his past orders or product search experience.
In other words, if you are not utilizing a product recommendation strategy on your WooCommerce site, you are leaving a lot of possible sales off the track.
What Are the Default WooCommerce Recommended Product Settings?
WooCommerce plugin for WordPress sites comes with built-in product recommendation capabilities. Also, it is easy to configure your online store to display related merchandise on each of its product pages in three ways:
- Cross-sells
- Up-sells
- Related Products
Let’s talk about each of these ways in detail.
WooCommerce Cross-Sells
These are products that you can promote in a buyer’s cart based on the items he has picked for purchase.
Ever seen a section in the cart that says ‘You May Also Be Interested In:’ while you buy stuff online? That is what cross-selling is about. You can also think of them as complimentary items. For instance, if you are selling mobile phones, then attractive headphones and back cover might be the cross-sells you can choose.
Depending on the website’s theme, cross-sells are displayed on the cart page, with product images next to the table that shows items already added into the cart.
WooCommerce Up-Sells
Up-sells are those products that you can recommend to a user based on the product(s) he has recently viewed. The primary purpose of showcasing up-sells is to convince a buyer to opt for better quality, expensive products that are more profitable to you.
Unlike cross-sells, these products are showcased on the product detail page based on the site’s theme.
WooCommerce Related Products
While you, as the website admin, can control or select up-sells or cross-sells manually, related products are showcased differently. They are sorted and displayed automatically on all the product pages on your site that fall into the same category or tags of other products.
In general, related products block on a page does not exist together with the up-sells block. To remove the default related products block, you need to make changes in the code.
You must also know that the products displayed as ‘related products’ could not be highly related to each other. It is because not all products that fall into the same categories or have the same tags go well together.
How to Add an Up-sell or Cross-Sell to a Product in WooCommerce?
Here are the steps you need to follow to add cross-sells or up-sells to one or more products on your WooCommerce site:
- Log into your admin dashboard and click ‘Products’ dashboard menu
- Choose the product for the detail page of which you want to display cross-sell or up-sell
- Scroll the page down to reach the ‘Product Data’ panel
- Select the ‘Linked Products’ tab in it
- Search for the products you would like to showcase and add them
- Click ‘Update’
The Best WooCommerce Related Products Plugins
Though there are some basic ways to add and display related products in WooCommerce, you may want to do some more. Especially if you want to put your creativity behind cross selling and up selling you need some more features like Product Slider for Related Products or you could even want to display related products with special rules and conditions (algorithm). So we give you the best WooCommerce plugins for related products.
WPB Related Products Slider for WooCommerce
You can use this powerful plugin to improve the visual appeal of the related product sections on your site. Upon installation and successful configuration, it replaces the default related products section in WooCommerce with a dynamic slider. This way, you can showcase several related products on a single product page in the form of a slider. The standard design of the slider is meant to match diverse kinds of WooCommerce stores.
This plugin comes with responsive features, meaning the slider will fit well into the screen of all devices used by the end customers to visit your site. You can also manage some of the basic style settings.
Features of WPB Related Products Slider Free Plugin:
- The free plugin automatically displays related products based on the chosen categories or tags of products
- Provides only 2 themes for the slider
- Easy to use and customize and compatible with all WordPress themes
Features of WPB Related Products Slider Pro Plugin
- Ability to select related products that match a specific product category
- Can display tag-based related products
- Up-sells and cross-sells product slider
- Ordering of related products possible
- Easy to enable or disable slider pagination and speed
- More style settings
WooCommerce Recommendation Engine
A good way to convince the site visitors to buy more from you is to show them the products they most want or look for. Recommendation engine plugin, as the name suggests, allows you to configure product suggestions for your customers based on a variety of parameters. With this plugin, you can work on providing automatic cross-sells and up-sells to allow the end-users to buy more products from your site.
Features of WooCommerce Recommendation Engine Plugin:
- Show related products based on what customers views on your site
- Display related products based on order history
- Showcase products that are mostly sold together
- Has a WooCommerce widget that you can embed and display anywhere according to your theme
Related Products for WooCommerceÂ
Another aspect of increasing sales on your WooCommerce site is to display fresh, random related products to the users on page refresh. It often happens that users feel annoyed to see the same related products on a specific product page. However, showing them a new set of related products each time they refresh a product page may attract their attention to buy more. You can make it happen for your site using this plugin.
Features of Related Products for WooCommerce Plugin:
- Display related products in posts, pages or sidebar widgets using shortcode
- Can exclude selected taxonomies from the display
- Show related products based on attributes like color or size
- Showcase related products with or without a slider
- Translation of heading text of related products is possible
Boost Sales for WooCommerce
As a WooCommerce extension, Boost Sales for WooCommerce plugin helps in increasing the ROI through up-sells and cross-sells. Other than using this plugin for your site, you can use it to build themes for sale. In terms of up-selling, this plugin is unique as it offers related products in the form of an upsell pop-up. As the website admin, you can select which product you want to display in the pop-up. Not just that, you can select up-sell products in the same categories if selecting any specific product seems difficult.
Features of Boost Sales for WooCommerce Free Plugin:
- The free version has a cross-sell feature to offer a bundle of products instead of a single product
- Easy to create cross-sells bundles for sale
- Quick information display about the cross-sells within the pop-up
Features of Boost Sales for WooCommerce Pro Plugin:
Premium version of this plugin comes with all the features of the free plugin as well as the following:Up-Sell Features
- Bulk up-sell addition
- Syncing up of up-sell products from WooCommerce possible
- Ability to hide up-sell pop-ups for distinct product pages
- Automatically hides up-sell products that are out-of-stock
- Hides products in up-sell pop-ups if they are already in the cart
- Automatic display of recently viewed products
- Sorting of up-sell products possible
Cross-Sell Features
- Product page display of cross-sell bundle instead of a pop-up
- Enable or disable displaying cross-sell products on a product page
- Displaying cross-sell products on the cart or checkout page
- Can add name and description to cross-selling bundles
- Overriding of products if they are already in the cart
Choose the Right Plugins to Scale Your Business Towards Growth
WooCommerce comes with a variety of default features to help you run and grow an online store. However, with more powerful, advanced related product recommendation plugins, you can smartly offer more products to your customers and increase sales. Make sure you select the right plugins based on your business needs.
I like WooCommerce for its simplicity and it’s possibilities to customize it the way you need. I’m currently also using Followprice. It’s a price drop & availability alert for your customers. I think it’s a must have for any online store. You should check it out for your next list!