How to show related products in WooCommerce (2023)

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Do you want to show related products in WooCommerce?

Whether you’re a new or established eCommerce business owner, chances are, you’re always looking for opportunities to increase your business’ revenue.

Recommending relevant products to customers is a powerful sales and marketing technique that can help bring customers’ attention to the other products you sell and encourage them to spend more money with your eCommerce store.

Plus, it’s super easy to set this up on your website.

In this beginner-friendly guide, we’ll look at what related products are, the benefits of setting them up on your eCommerce website, and the steps to set up related products using the built-in feature within WooCommerce and with a plugin.

This guide covers:

  1. What are related products
  2. Why add related products in WooCommerce
  3. How to show related products in WooCommerce without a plugin
  4. How to show related products in WooCommerce with a plugin
  5. Conclusion

Related products are product recommendations shown to customers in addition to the products they are currently viewing.

Showing related products to customers is an effective way to improve the conversion rate on your eCommerce website and increase your business’ revenue.

There are two main types of related products recommendations that you can show to customers:

  1. Upsells: Upselling is a technique where you recommend a more expensive version of the same type of product to customers. When you upsell, you prompt customers to replace their current product choice with a more expensive one. For example, if a customer is viewing a $50 bean bag and you recommend an $85 ‘premium’ version of the bean bag.
  2. Cross-sells: If you’ve ever opted to add fries to your McDonald’s order to make it a meal, you’ve been cross-sold. Cross-selling is a technique where you recommend complementary products to customers in addition to the original product they intended to buy. An example of cross-selling in eCommerce is one where a customer wants to buy a phone and you recommend accessories like phone chargers, earphones, protective covers, etc.

By now, you can likely think of several instances where you’ve bought products that were upsold or cross-sold to you.

Upselling and cross-selling are popular techniques used across several industries and companies, with good reason — they’re proven to be highly effective.

According to research by Salesforce, displaying related product recommendations on your eCommerce website can:

  1. Increase the average order value (AOV): The average order value (AOV) is the average amount of money each customer spends every time they place an order from your eCommerce store. From the research, the average order value of customers that clicked on product recommendations increased by 10% and these customers spent five times more.
  2. Increase customer lifetime value (CLV): Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount that a business can expect each customer to spend throughout the lifetime of the business relationship. 37% of customers that clicked on a recommended product during their first visit returned for more shopping, compared to just 19% of customers that didn’t click on a recommended product during their first visit.
  3. Delight customers: Although many sales and marketing tactics tend to evoke negative reactions from customers, relevant product recommendations can delight them — when done right. Relevant product recommendations can help customers save time and provide a better experience overall, as they don’t have to look for other products they may need.

All these benefits translate to a better experience for your customers, better brand perception, and more revenue for your business.

By default, the related products feature is embedded within WooCommerce. So you don’t need to download another plugin to show related products on your website.

To display related products in WooCommerce without a plugin, you’ll have to manually create a connection between the related products using their categories, tags, or both. For example, if you have a shirt and a pair of pants that are similar in color or style, you can add the same categories or tags to both products. Then, on the product page for the shirt, you can add the pants as an upsell or cross-sell to display the pair of pants as a related product.

Pros of using this method: It’s easy to set up and doesn’t add more code to your website.

Cons of using this method: It can be time-consuming if you have a lot of products.

Recommended for: eCommerce stores with fifteen products or less.

Step-by-step instructions on how to show related products in WooCommerce without a plugin

Step 1: Log into your WordPress dashboard and select “Products” > “All Products”.

Note: You need to have added at least one other product in WooCommerce to set this up.

Step 2: Hover your mouse on the product for which you want to add a related products section and click on “Edit”.

Step 3: Scroll down to the “Product data” module and click on the “Linked Products” tab.

Step 4: The “Linked Products” tab is where you add products to be recommended on your eCommerce store. There are 2 fields on the “Linked Products” tab:

  1. Upsells: Upsell recommendations are displayed on the product page, below the product description and other primary item details.
  2. Cross-sells: Cross-sell recommendations are displayed in the shopping cart, right before the customer enters their payment details to complete the order.

Here’s how to add related product upsell recommendations in WooCommerce

1: In the “Upsells” field, start typing in keywords that describe the other products your eCommerce website sells.

2: As you type, products in your catalog that match the keyword you’re typing will show up. Select the products to be displayed as upsell recommendations. Although there’s no limit to the number of upsell recommendations that you can add to each product, we recommend that you add three to five products to avoid overwhelming your customers with too many options.

Tip: To speed things up, open up your product catalog in a separate window and display all the inventory in your eCommerce store.

3: Scroll back to the top of the page and click on “Update” or “Publish” if you’re creating a brand new page.

Now you can head over to your website and select the product for which you just added upsell recommendations to view how it looks. The recommended products will show under the “Related Products” headline.

Here’s how to add related product cross-sell recommendations in WooCommerce

1: In the “Cross-sells” field, start typing in keywords that describe the other products your eCommerce website sells.

2: Similarly to adding upsells, as you type, products in your catalog that match the keyword you’re typing will show up. Select the products to be displayed as cross-sell recommendations. To avoid overwhelming your customers with too many options, we recommend that you add three to five products only.

Tip: Open up your product catalog in a separate window and display all the inventory in your eCommerce store to speed things up.

3: Scroll back to the top of the page and click on “Update” or “Publish” if you’re creating a brand new page. 

To test this out, head over to your eCommerce store and add a product to the cart. The cross-sell recommendations will be displayed below the shopping cart with the “Related Products” header.

That’s it. You’ve now seen how to show related products in WooCommerce using the default WooCommerce settings. Next, we’ll look at how to display related woocommerce products using a plugin.

Now, let’s look at how to show related products in WooCommerce with a plugin.

Although there are several plugin options that you can use, in this guide, we’ll use the Related Products for WooCommerce plugin by WebToffee as it’s one of the best product recommendation plugins.

Pros of using this method: It’s easy to set up and use to show related products and saves time if you have a lot of products.

Cons of using this method: If you have less than fifteen products in your eCommerce store, you may prefer to add related products using the built-in feature within WooCommerce.

Recommended for: eCommerce stores that sell more than fifteen products.

Step-by-step instructions on how to show related products in WooCommerce with a plugin

Step 1: Install and activate the Related Products for WooCommerce by WebToffee plugin using these instructions.

Step 2: Installing the Related Products for WooCommerce plugin adds a “Related products” tab within WooCommerce. From your WordPress dashboard, select “Woocommerce”, then “Related Products”.

Now, it’s time to configure the Related Products for WooCommerce plugin settings.

Step 3: Select “Custom related products” as the working mode. This will show related products on your website based on the plugin’s settings.

Step 4: Tick the checkbox if you want the related product recommendations to show in the cart when the customer’s checking out. We recommend that you select this to enable cross-sell product recommendations.

Step 5: By default, product recommendations are shown under the “Related Products” headline. If you’re happy with that, you can leave this setting as is. If not, type in the new heading that you want to be displayed above the product recommendations on your website.

Step 6: Select the criteria to display the related products throughout your website. You can choose to show related products according to the product category, product tag, or both. 

Note: You can set up the product category and product tag for each product on their product pages.

Step 7: Choose the order for the related products to appear on the product page. You can choose the order according to the product title, date, slug name, random, last notification, price, popularity, average rating, and more.

Step 8: Next, select the order for the products to be shown, i.e, ascending or descending order.

Step 9: By default, the plugin will display 3 product recommendations to customers. If you want to change that, enter the preferred number in the “Number of products to display” section.

Step 10: Tick the checkbox to exclude products that are out-of-stock from being recommended to customers.

Step 11: This option will determine how the product recommendations are displayed on the page. If you want to show the products in a slider, tick the checkbox to enable the “Use slider” option.

Step 12: If you selected the option to enable the slider, you can now select the type of slider you want, whether a “bxslider” or “Swiper slider”.

Step 13: Enter text to alter the width of the “Related products” section.

Step 14: Choose the number of products to be shown in the slider depending on what type of device the customer is viewing your website on — whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Step 15: WPML is a popular multilingual WordPress plugin used to build and run multilingual sites. If you use the WPML plugin on your site, tick the checkbox if you want to display related products for products that have been translated from another language based on the original product ID.

Step 16: Tick the checkbox to override the “Related Products” setting on your existing WordPress website’s theme.

Step 17: Finally, click on “Save Changes” to save your changes.

Conclusion

There are two easy methods to show related products in WooCommerce: by using a WordPress plugin or without one.

To display related products without a plugin, you can use the built-in WooCommerce functionality. Alternatively, you can use a WooCommerce plugin like the Related Products for WooCommerce by WebToffee.

Whichever method you choose, recommending relevant products to customers is a simple and effective technique to delight your customers and improve your business’ revenue.

Check out the rest of our blog for more content to help you make the most of WordPress.

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