Are you using WooCommerce product recommendations to boost sales and enhance your customer experience?
According to Salesforce, shoppers who clicked on product recommendations were 4.5 times more likely to add items to their cart and complete a purchase.
WooCommerce includes some basic product recommendation features, but they may not be enough to optimize results throughout the buyer’s journey.
To maximize results, store owners should strategically place product recommendations across your site and send follow-up emails with product suggestions to encourage repeat purchases.
In this blog, we’ll show you how to strategically recommend products in WooCommerce at each stage of your customer’s shopping journey. This will help you increase your store’s average order value (AOV).
We’ll cover how to add product recommendations to these key areas:
So, let’s begin.
Contents
WooCommerce product recommendations involve suggesting additional products to customers based on their browsing and purchasing history, preferences, and behavior on your site.
These recommendations help guide customers, encouraging them to spend more time on your site and purchase more items, ultimately boosting sales and enhancing the shopping experience.
Common types of product recommendations in WooCommerce include:
Adding product recommendations to WooCommerce can offer several benefits, including enhanced user experience, boosted sales, and improved overall store performance.
Here’s why you should consider implementing product recommendations in WooCommerce:
Product recommendations, such as upsells and cross-sells, encourage users to add more items to their carts.
You can increase the AOV and generate more revenue per transaction by suggesting complementary or higher-priced products.
Personalized product recommendations make shopping easier for customers by helping them discover items that match their interests and needs.
This reduces decision fatigue and leads to purchase decisions faster, creating a smoother, more engaging shopping experience.
Targeted product suggestions tailored to customer behavior or preferences are more likely to convert better.
Recommendations based on browsing history, previous purchases, or popular items encourage users to purchase.
Re-engage customers and encourage repeat business by suggesting products based on previous purchases.
Offering personalized suggestions in follow-up emails or on thank-you pages strengthens customer relationships.
By leveraging the customer data, you can offer smart, algorithm-driven recommendations.
This enhances the shopping experience and maximizes the value of data collection efforts, making your WooCommerce store feel dynamic and responsive.
Our experts have handpicked the five best WooCommerce product recommendation plugins you can use to optimize your store for a better experience.
FunnelKit Funnel Builder is the most powerful sales funnel builder for WordPress.
It allows you to create high-converting sales funnel pages, including opt-in pages, landing pages, checkout pages, order bumps, one-click upsells, and thank you pages.
You can add product suggestions on and after the checkout page with a single click.
This way, you can increase your store’s average order value and bring more revenue.
Features of FunnelKit Funnel Builder:
Apart from that, it offers many features such as checkout optimizations, detailed analytics, etc.
FunnelKit Funnel Builder is a complete WooCommerce checkout manager plugin to grow your online business.
It is available in both lite (free) and premium versions, which start at $99.50 annually.
This WooCommerce plugin lets you offer smart upsells, cross-sells, and frequently bought-together recommendations.
You can improve the shopping experience by placing item recommendations at strategic locations.
Additionally, you’ll be able to measure their impact and optimize your strategies with in-depth analytics.
Key features:
The Product Recommendations for WooCommerce plugin is only available in the premium version for $99 a year.
FunnelKit Cart for WooCommerce transforms your store’s default cart page into a beautiful, dynamic sliding cart.
It lets users view and modify their cart items and add product recommendations, such as upsells or cross-sells right inside the cart.
FunnelKit Cart gamifies the shopping experience by setting up attractive threshold-based rewards.
Key features:
FunnelKit Cart has free (lite) and premium versions for advanced capabilities. The premium version comes with the Funnel Builder package.
FunnelKit Automations is the marketing automation and broadcast CRM for WordPress and WooCommerce.
It’s an all-in-one tool that helps you set up automations, send SMS and email broadcasts, track carts, manage contacts, and more.
You can send product recommendations via emails, SMS, and dynamic coupons to incentivize customers for their next purchase.
Features of FunnelKit Automations:
FunnelKit Automations has both free (lite) and premium versions available. Its premium version starts at $99.50 a year.
This recommendations plugin from Webtoffee generates intelligent product suggestions for your customers and helps maximize the average cart value.
You can display your products on attractive grids or sliders to boost customer engagement and conversions.
Key features:
This WooCommerce recommendations plugin is available for $99 a year.
WooCommerce has some default features that recommend products to users. You can display recommended products on the WooCommerce product page and cart page.
On each product page, WooCommerce recommends the upsell products you would set in the background in the section headlined “You may also like…”
You can add the upsell products from the Linked Products tab in the Product Data section of WooCommerce product options.
Along with upselling products, WooCommerce automatically recommends products from the same category in the “Related products” section.
Pros and cons of product recommendation on the product page
✅ Pros: It's a default option for WooCommerce, so it doesn’t require any extra
❌ Cons: Users have to edit each product individually to add product recommendations. Moreover, when users click on different product recommendations, they may get distracted from the initial purchase.
For more details, read our blog on how to offer product recommendations on WooCommerce product page.
WooCommerce recommends cross-selling products on the cart page of a store under the heading “You may be interested in….”
You can set up cross-sell products from the Linked Products tab like upsell products.
Here is what the cross-sell recommendation looks like on the default cart page:
Pros and cons of product recommendations on the cart page
✅ Pros: As it’s a WooCommerce default feature, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.
❌ Cons: Adding product recommendations on the cart page can divert users from the checkout process, leading them to different product pages.
To maximize your chances of increasing sales with high order value, you should also recommend relevant products in all the possible scopes.
In the following section, we will share how you can offer product recommendations in the above-mentioned ways.
Here, we will show you how you can recommend cross-sell and upsell products on a side mini cart. This way, users can access their cart from anywhere on the website and also add, update, and remove their cart items.
For this process, we will use FunnelKit Cart (both free and pro). You will get the pro version of FunnelKit Cart with FunnelKit Funnel Builder Plus and above.
FunnelKit cart offers a side cart that users can access from anywhere on the site, view their order details and also update cart items.
The best part is with this Woocommerce product recommendation engine; you can offer product suggestions on the side cart so users can add them to their cart with a single click.
Note: make sure the FunnelKit Cart is installed and activated to follow this section.
The first step is to enable the Slide-in cart by FunnelKit. For that, navigate to Funnelkit ⇒ Cart. Then, click on the “Enable Cart” toggle button to turn on the sliding cart.
For more details on how to customize the look and how to display the Woocommerce product recommendations list on the mini cart, read our blog how to add a mini cart in WooCommerce.
To enable the Upsells option, go to the Upsells tab and turn on the “Enable Cart Upsells” option.
Now, choose the display type. You get 4 options:
After choosing how you want to display your recommended products, customize the following:
The “Default Upsells” option lets you add items to show up as upsell recommendations in case the existing cart products don’t have any upsell products assigned to them.
You can just search products by name and add them to the default upsell in WooCommerce.
You can add as many upsell products as you want, but the “show maximum upsells” option will limit the number of items on the front end.
Note: Turn on the “Always Show Default Upsells” option to always recommend the default upsell products.
As we have already shown earlier in this blog, you can add upsell and cross-sell products from the WooCommerce product page. But it can be tedious as you have to edit each individual product page separately every time you want to add a cross-sell or upsell.
For that, the FunnelKit Cart team has designed a sleek interface that allows you to add upsells and cross-sells from the cart setup page itself. This way, you don’t have to go back and forth to each WooCommerce product.
To add upsell or cross to any product from the Funnel Cart page, click on the “View All Products” link.
After that, you will see a sleek interface where you can either scroll down to find the product or search for the product using the search option. After that, expand the product section to add more upsells.
Note: If a product already has an upsell or cross-sell product assigned to it, then you will find it here.
To add a new upsell, click on the “Add Upsell” button. Then, search for the product and choose the product from the suggested dropdown. After that, click on “Add” to add the product as an upsell.
Repeat the same process to add cross-sell as well.
🔔 Note: You can also add variable products to your upsell and cross-sell. This way, the buyer can choose the specific product variations they want to buy right from inside the cart. You can add as many upsell products as you want using the same process.
After adding the product recommendations, click the Save button to update the settings you just modified. You can click on the “Preview on Page” button to see how your WooCommerce cart upsell product looks.
Here is a preview of how the product recommendation in the Woocommerce slide will look like:
Note: FunnelKit Cart also offers a milestone-based reward system that motivates users to shop more by offering free shipping, discounts, and free gift if they shop worth a certain amount. For more details, read our blog 👇
You can check the whole process in this video below:
Pros and cons of product recommendations on the mini cart
✅ Pros: This method encourages users to buy more with a milestone-based reward system. Additionally, it offers in-cart upsell product recommendations to increase the Average Order Value (AOV). Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to set up upsell and cross-sell recommendations without editing individual products.
❌ Cons: While FunnelKit Cart offers a free plugin, access to the rewards system and upsells requires the Pro version. However, just a few upsells can easily cover the cost of the package.
Now you know how to offer WooCommerce product recommendations on a mini cart, let’s move on to the next section on how you can offer pre-purchase upsell on the checkout page.
Order bumps are low-dollar offers that users can add to their order with just one click before they checkout.
You can offer cross-sell products as an order bump on the checkout page right before users checkout. This approach capitalizes on the user's current buying momentum, offering them a low-cost, relevant product that can be added to their order with a single click.
This not only enhances the overall shopping experience but also boosts the average order value.
To offer a product recommendation on the WooCommerce checkout page, we will use FunnelKit Funnel Builder. This is the most potent tool for creating WooCommerce sales funnels. This is one of the best rule-based recommendation engines that help you offer conditional pre-purchase and post-purchase product recommendations.
You need to install and activate both:
After activating the plugins, follow these steps:
Firstly, we need to create a store checkout that will replace the default WooCommerce checkout page. For that, navigate to FunnelKit ⇒ Store Checkout and click on “Create Store Checkout.”
FunnelKit offers many prebuilt templates for the checkout page. Choose your favorite page builder. After that, hover over the template you want for your Global checkout and click on Preview. We are going with Minimalist here.
Now, choose whether you want a single-page checkout or a multi-page checkout. After that, click on “Import This Funnel,” provide a name, and click on "Done" to import this funnel as your default checkout.
This will import a store checkout with three steps: Checkout, One click upsell, and Thank you page.
Note: You can customize both the Checkout Page and the Thank You Pages template as per your requirements.
Now, you need to add a new step to offer an order bump on the checkout page. For that, click on “Add Order Bump,” provide a title, and click on Add.
After that choose an order bump skin. For that hover on the skin you like and click on Import.
Now search for the product and click on Add.
This will add an order bump step to your store checkout funnel.
Set the call-to-action text and description that will show up on the checkout page.
Move to the Style tab. Here you can choose the position where the order bump will show up on the checkout page.
Make sure to click on Save to update the changes.
Once you have added the offer, you can offer a discount on the order bump and specify a quantity. You can also select the display behavior and placement on the checkout page.
Offering order bumps for all the orders may not result in conversion all the time. Instead, you can offer rule-based order bumps in your store checkout flow to make it more effective.
This way, your order bumps will only be displayed based on the rules you set.
For example, you may only order bumps for those who buy from a certain category. Or maybe to people with products worth a certain amount in their cart.
To do so, move to the Rules tab and click on “Add Rules”.
Here, you can select the rule upon which you want to create the condition and then set the condition. Here, we are going with “Cart Category(s),” then setting the condition “matches any of,” and lastly, adding the categories.
With this condition, when people are about to checkout with products from the T-shirt category, they will be offered this order bump.
Make sure to click on Save.
After setting the order bump and condition, it’s time to activate the store checkout. For that, enable the “Enable Store Checkout” option.
If you try to place a test order with at least two items in your cart or order a total of 50, as per the condition, we should see the order bump offer on your checkout page.
This is how you can easily offer product recommendations on the WooCommerce checkout page. You can also read our blog on 23 WooCommerce Checkout Optimization Hacks.
Pros and cons of product recommendations on the checkout page
✅ Pros: This method drives impulse purchases. Its rule engine enables highly targeted offers to keep users focused during the buying process.
❌ Cons: You need to be thoughtful of the offer for maximum results. If you need order bump ideas, you can read our blog on "order bump ideas".
You can recommend products in WooCommerce after users checkout using the one-click upsell feature by FunnelKit Funnel Builder.
Move to the next section to find out more.
Note: You can read our blog on Top 10 Upselling Techniques to Generate More Revenue.
Post-purchase upsells are offers you can make to users right after they check out, and they can just buy them with a single click without re-entering the payment details. Once a user places an order, the card gets tokenized. This way, you can add the extra amount to their order as soon as they accept the offer without asking them to provide payment details again.
To offer post-purchase one-click upsell on your WooCommerce store, you need to click on the Offer step.
Here you can customize the content and look of the upsell template by clicking on the Edit Elementor Template option.
Now move to the Products tab. Now click on "Add Product", then search for the product and select from the dropdown. After that click on the "Add" button to add the product as upsell offer.
You can offer discounts on the upsell offer to make it more lucrative and customize the settings. We recommend checking the option “Skip this offer if the product(s) exist in parent order.”
Make sure to click on Save to update.
Again, to make the offer more effective, you can apply rules like you did with the order bump. For that, click on the Upsell step.
Now on to the rules tab and click on Add Rules.
Here, we are setting a condition that an upsell offer will be shown to users who place an order worth 70 or above.
Make sure to click on the 'Save' button when done.
Here is what your upsell template will look like:
Pros and cons of post-purchase one-click product recommendation
✅ Pros: Sell more with high-dollar as a post-purchase, one-click offer that doesn't interfere with the primary offer, ensuring a distraction-free, seamless checkout experience.
❌ Cons: One-click upsells are supported by some popular gateways like Stripe, Mollie, Braintree, and PayPal, but not all, as not every gateway can tokenize users' cards, which is required for post-purchase upsell offers.
Your product recommendation strategies don’t have to stop when users are done shopping in your store. You can use the power of recommendation even after customers leave your website using email automation.
Move to the next section to find out how to do WooCommerce product recommendations in post-purchase emails.
To offer product recommendations using email automation, we will use FunnelKit Automations.
This is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing plugin that allows you to automate the process of email automation based on different triggers such as abandoned carts, win-back campaigns, birthday emails, etc.
In addition to triggered emails, you can design attractive emails and send both email and SMS broadcasts.
The best part is that with FunnelKit Automations, you can send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts.
Make sure you have installed and activated FunnelKit Automations before you move on to the main process.
The first step is to create a new automation. For that, navigate to FunnelKit Automations ⇒ Automations and then click on Create New Automation.
Select the blank template, provide a name, and click on Create.
This will add a blank automation on your workspace.
Now, it’s time to select a trigger. To do so, click on the “Select Trigger” option.
On the WooCommerce tab, select the “Order Created” event. This will trigger this automation once someone orders on your WooCommerce site.
Choose the order statutes for which you want this automation to trigger. Here, we are going with the order completed as we want to send product recommendations after the previous order is delivered. Choose "Multiple times" for runs on contact to send recommendations to customers every time they place an order.
Now, we are going to add some delay because you don’t want to overwhelm the user just after they make an order. You should recommend their product after a gap of some time.
To do so, click on the + icon and click on Delay.
After that, add delay and click on Save changes. We have added a delay of 3 days.
Now, you need to add another action that will send the email. To do so, click on the + icon and then select Action.
After that, from the Messaging tab, choose the “Send Email” action and click on Done to add the action.
First, provide the email subject and preview text.
You can use merge tags to add dynamic data values like customer names that help personalize your emails.
To add any merge tag, click on {{..}} and search, copy the merge tag, paste it on the email subject line, and preview the text as you need.
As per the email body, you can design in four ways: Visual Builder (New), Rich Text, Raw HTML, and Visual Builder.
Our experts recommend using Visual Builder (New). For this choose “Visual Builder (New)” and click ‘Edit’.
After that, you can choose any of the prebuilt templates. Here we will choose “Cross Sell Products Template”. For this hover on the template and click Preview.
Now, hit “Import This Template” to import.
You can customize the template according to your needs, like changing the logo, updating the menu, adding a new banner, etc.
As per the product recommendation section, the template already includes a built-in feature. Here, you can choose whether to share related products (upsell, cross-sell, or both), best-selling products, or specific products if desired.
Depending on the option you select, the email will populate with the corresponding products from your WooCommerce store.
You can also offer a discount coupon in your product recommendation email to incentivize your next purchase. You can easily add a discount section using the Coupon block by FunnelKit Automations.
For more details, read our blog on how to use dynamic coupons in email.
Sending a test email allows you to thoroughly review the email's content and layout, ensuring that it appears as intended to your recipients.
To send a test email, click on “Preview and Test”. Then, provide the receipt email and hit “Send Email”.
Here is what the email we created looks like :
Here is what the automation looks like:
The final step is to activate the automation so your users receive emails with WooCommerce product recommendations after the set delay. To do that, return to the automation page and turn on the toggle button at the top right center.
This will make your automation go live.
Pros and cons of product recommendations in post-purchase email
✅ Pros: With product recommendations in follow-up emails, you have the chance to bring users back to your WooCommerce website and encourage repeat purchases.
❌ Cons: As follow-up emails have a 40.5% open rate, your users may not open to read the emails. To avoid such issues, make sure to use enticing subject lines and follow up with at least 2-3 emails.
Here are some tips to follow for boosting revenue generated from WooCommerce product recommendations:
Segment your customer based on their behavior, preferences, and purchase history. The more relevant product you offer, the better the chance of getting conversions.
Make sure the user interface is user-friendly to enhance the shopping experience and make users buy more products. Ensure your designs are mobile friendly as a large share of people use mobile to shop these days.
You can conduct A/B tests to experiment with different recommendation strategies, such as order bumps, one-click upsells, and follow-up emails. This will give you a better idea about what your customers want.
You should keep track of analytics to find out how your product recommendations are performing. Analyze reports in different matrices such as click rate, conversion rate, revenue generated, average order value, etc.
To achieve maximum results, you should develop a long-term plan for WooCommerce product recommendations and continuously refine it based on data and insights from customer interactions.
In this section, our experts have answered some commonly asked questions about WooCommerce product recommendations.
1. How do I add a recommended product in WooCommerce?
You can set up recommended products in WooCommerce product and cart page using default linked products tab in the product data section.
For rest of the shopping journey like on or after the checkout page, you can do it with FunnelKit - setting up recommendations is quite easy. Add a product, offer some discounts and that’s it!
You can even send upsell emails with CRM tools like FunnelKit Automations.
2. Which WooCommerce plugins are best for product recommendations?
We’ve already listed the best WooCommerce plugins for product recommendations in this article.
Our experts have suggested to use FunnelKit because you can set up upsells and cross-sells across 80% of the shopping journey touchpoints.
Navigating and setting up these recommendations is quite easy with FunnelKit Funnel Builder, Cart for WooCommerce and Automations CRM.
3. Are there any risks in offering product recommendations in WooCommerce?
There are some risks in offering product recommendations in WooCommerce, such as poorly targeted recommendations that can frustrate customers.
Additionally, if you offer too many recommendations, it can clutter the page and distract shoppers, leading them to abandon their initial purchase.
4. How can I track the performance of product recommendations in my store?
You can track the performance of product recommendations with FunnelKit’s detailed analytics that help you view conversions at each step of the buying process.
In addition to that, you can even A/B test to determine which recommendation placements, designs and product options lead to higher conversion and engagement.
5. Can WooCommerce product recommendations be automated?
Yes, WooCommerce product recommendations can be automated using plugins like FunnelKit. These tools use machine learning, AI, or customer behavior data to automatically generate personalized suggestions.
We hope you’ve learned how to expand your product recommendations beyond WooCommerce’s default options, which only cover 15-20% of the customer’s journey.
By leveraging all the recommendation strategies discussed in this blog, you can significantly boost your sales revenue across up to 80% of the shopping process.
With FunnelKit Funnel Builder, you can suggest products at different stages of the shopping journey, making it easier for customers to find and buy the right items and spend more.
Additionally, this Woocommerce product recommendation plugin offers in-depth analytics, allowing you to measure the impact of your suggestions and optimize your strategies accordingly.
FunnelKit Automations allows you to encourage more purchases through email suggestions even after users leave your site. The great thing about email automations is that they work even when you’re not actively managing them.
Maximize every opportunity to recommend products and increase your sales.
Get FunnelKit now to supercharge your sales!
