Would you like to sell more products at your store without having to generate more visitors and customers?
If so, upsells and cross-sells are one way to generate more sales or revenue from the same number of customers.
By suggesting related products – cross-sells – and more expensive products – upsells – when a visitor is browsing your store, you can hopefully encourage customers to add more items to their cart or buy higher-priced products. Either way, you’ll be generating more revenue from the same number of customers.
But how can you do that? If WooCommerce powers your eCommerce store, there’s an affordable extension that recommends products to your visitors.
In this guide, we briefly cover what the Product Recommendations extension can do and then walk through how to enable this functionality at your eCommerce store.
If you’d like to sell more products and increase the value of each of your customers, read on to find out how to do it with automated eCommerce product recommendations.
About the Product Recommendations Extension
The Product Recommendations extension by WooCommerce is available for $79 a year.
Once enabled on your WooCommerce store, you can configure the extension to display recommended products in the way you want.
As the extension is very flexible, you can instruct it to suggest products according to various criteria. Some examples include recommending products that are in a particular category, items that cost more or less than the product being viewed, products that are frequently bought together, and much more.
Displaying a block of trending products or new arrivals at your store is an option, too.
You can also choose exactly where the recommended products are displayed. Options include the single product page, the shop page, and the checkout pages, to name just a few.
While the Product Recommendations extension isn’t free, it shouldn’t take long to pay for itself and then start generating profit at your store – all without having to increase traffic and customers.
How to Display Product Recommendations in WooCommerce
To use this extension, you’ll need a WordPress eCommerce store that’s powered by the WooCommerce plugin.
WooCommerce Product Recommendations Extension
While there are a few ways to display recommended products at your WooCommerce store, a very flexible and powerful way to do so is to use the Product Recommendations extension from the WooCommerce team.
As mentioned, it’s not a free add-on for WooCommerce. But it should help you to generate more sales at your store, thanks to its ability to increase upsells and cross-sells.
Install the Product Recommendations Extension
Once you’ve purchased and downloaded the Product Recommendations extension, it needs to be uploaded to your store.
To do so, log in to your WordPress dashboard. Then navigate to the Add Plugins screen by clicking on the Plugins > Add New menu item.
Click on the Upload Plugin button on the Add Plugins screen.
Next, click the Choose file button and browse to where you downloaded the Product Recommendations extension. Once you’ve located the file, click on the Install Now button in your WordPress dashboard.
Click the Activate Button on the next screen.
Access the Plugin
You can access the plugin by clicking on the WooCommerce > Recommendations menu item.
Create a Recommendation Engine
This extension uses “engines” to generate recommended products. So, you’ll first need to create an engine to get started.
When creating a recommendation engine, the main points to consider are what criteria you’d like the extension to use to recommend the products and where on your site those recommendations should be displayed.
When you can answer those questions, you’re ready to create your first recommendation engine.
To get started, click on the Engines tab of the Recommendation dashboard.
Choose an Engine Type
The first step to start suggesting products to your customers is to choose an engine type.
The engine type is related to where the recommended products will be displayed. For example, if you choose the Product engine type, the recommendations can be displayed on the product pages of your site alongside the product that the user is looking at.
Later, you can define exactly where the recommended products are displayed, such as where on the page they’re visible. But the engine type lets you create a recommendation engine for a specific part of your site, such as the individual product page or the order and checkout pages.
Using Filters
Once you’ve chosen an engine type, you can select which filters are used. The filters control which products are recommended by the engine. Some examples of the filters available include the product category, the price, and whether the product was recently viewed by the customer.
If you use the Current Category filter, the engine will display products in the same category as the product the user is currently viewing. Alternatively, you could use the Category filter and then choose a category to display products from.
These are two of the filters that can help encourage customers to add more products to their cart, generating cross-sells. They can either display related products from the same category or suggest products from a different category, such as the socks category, when a customer is looking at a product from the shoes category, for example.
If you choose to use the Relative Price filter, you can configure it so that it displays products that are a set amount more expensive than the currently viewed product. This would work well for generating upsells and encouraging visitors to buy a product that’s more expensive than the one they’re looking at.
Using Amplifiers
Next, you can use amplifiers to sort or promote the products recommended by the filters.
For example, you could use the Freshness amplifier to display newer products first. Or use it the other way and show older products first.
As you can add multiple amplifiers, you can set the weight of each one, giving one more preference than another.
Deploy the Engine
Once you’ve created an engine, you can publish it and then deploy it to a specific location on your site.
Some examples include the main shop page of your store, the product pages, the cart and checkout pages, and the order pages. You can deploy engines from the Locations tab of the extension.
You can also define how many products are displayed by using the column and row settings. You can choose where the recommendations are displayed on the page, too.
You can change the engine settings after you’ve published them, so don’t worry about getting it perfect the first time. Create the engine, deploy it, and then see how it looks. If it’s not quite right, you can go back and edit the engine at any time.
As mentioned earlier, each engine type can only be deployed to certain parts of your store. Therefore, if you want to deploy your engine to a specific part of your store and the option to do so isn’t available, you might have chosen the wrong engine type. You can view the options for each engine type in the Supported Locations section of this page.
You can also add optional visibility conditions, such as only showing generated recommendations if the product being viewed is from a specific category or tag or the price is in a specific range. This gives you a lot of flexibility regarding when recommended products are displayed.
Viewing the Recommended Products
If you view the part of your store where you deployed the recommendation engine, such as a product page, you should see some suggested products.
However, it can take a while for the engine to start displaying product recommendations. Due to this, you might instead see a message informing you of this rather than any products.
If your store is new and has no tracking data, then some of your engines might not work. For example, if you’ve configured the engine to recommend products that have been recently viewed or sold.
Analyzing the Effectiveness
You can see your recommendations’ effectiveness in the Extension Performance section. More detailed stats are available in the Analytics area of the WooCommerce dashboard on your site.
The analytics functionality of the extension tracks, among other things, purchases generated after a user clicks on a recommendation block.
As you can create multiple recommendation engines and deploy them to different parts of your store, there are lots of ways you can use this extension to generate more sales.
Summary
Hopefully, this WooCommerce tip has inspired you to take action.
The Product Recommendations extension for WooCommerce is a relatively quick and easy way to suggest additional products to your store visitors. You get a lot of control over which products are displayed and where they are shown.
Once you’ve created one or more recommendation engines with the extension and deployed them to your store, they will display related products based on your criteria until you disable them.
Thanks to this, you can let the extension run in the background, recommending products to your customers and hopefully generating upsells and cross-sells on autopilot.
If you want to increase profits without having to increase traffic, the WooCommerce Product Recommendations extension is one way to do so.
If you have any questions about this extension or WooCommerce product recommendations in general, please leave a comment below.
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