WooCommerce Recommended Products

Improving your WooCommerce Store

We're on tip 7 of a 30-part series on improving your online eCommerce store.

It’s a set of suggestions I'm making, regarding your WooCommerce site, because so many people do so much work just to get their store live and then stop enhancing it.

Just get here? Here’s what you may have missed already:

And that takes us to today, where we’re talking about WooCommerce Recommended Products.

What is a Recommendation Engine?

As I've mentioned before in my article on upsells and cross-sells, helping your customers find related items is important. The problem, as you may have likely figured out, is that you don't always know which items in your store belong together.

Confused? Let me give you a couple examples.

Imagine you're selling cigars like my friend Jorge. People buy cigars from him all the time. And it's not hard to guess which other products make sense to “connect.” You might offer a lighter or ash tray. But you might not immediately think of a hat.

But people who buy a certain brand of cigar may love to buy a hat. This is the kind of thing that you experience at Amazon simply because others doing it creates the correlation—one that Jorge may not of thought of himself.

It's called products purchased together. And it's a feature of a good recommendation engine.

Here's another example.

Imagine you're my friend Shawn selling WordPress education. You know what you're selling—it's access to online videos. But what if several people who have purchased access to the main material start buying his new WooCommerce training course? Those may not go into the cart at the same time (as in products purchased together), but they're still products recommended by purchase history.

Good recommendation engines look at what others have purchased, not just when they're making a purchase similar to yours, but when they come back later. And it creates additional correlations that store owners may not think of naturally.

So what is a recommendation engine?

A recommendation engine is one that takes a lot of data from other purchasers and uses it to make recommendations during your shopping experience to help you get the most from your purchases.

A WooCommerce Recommendation Engine

Should you set up WooCommerce recommended products? Absolutely.

These aren't just upsells or cross-sells. Those are important too and we'll surely talk about them as well. But beyond what you know, as a store owner, there is such a thing as the wisdom of the crowd.

[tweet “Your store should recommend additional products to your prospects and customers, intelligently. “]

That's what you're tapping into. A WooCommerce Recommendation Engine is exactly that—it's a way for you to tap into your existing customers to let their data help your new prospects.

And it's incredibly easy to add to your store simply by using an extension that takes care of all the work for you.

It's a short and simple tip:

Your store should recommend additional products to your prospects and customers, intelligently.

The Reason for Intelligent Recommendations

If you pursue this tip, I believe you'll see three key metrics improve:

You'll help your customer find related things, which can improve your repeat customer rate (RCR)
You'll help improve your average order value (AOV) metric
You'll build trust that drives your customer lifetime value (CLTV)

So get started on WooCommerce recommended products.

Note: If you find that the data analytics performed by this plugin are slowing you down, or if you just want to beef up your store's hosting, it may be time to consider upgrading your site infrastructure. Let me know if you want hosting recommendations based on your unique store details.