How to show personalized product recommendations in WooCommerce

Choose the behaviour you want to use before changing your store. Common options include products bought together, products viewed in the same session, previous purchases, wishlist activity, recently viewed products and trending items.

Also decide where the recommendations should appear. Product pages suit alternatives and complementary items; the cart suits cross-sells; checkout and thank-you pages suit add-ons related to the current order.

For a small catalogue, start with the built-in route. Edit a product, open the Product data panel, select Linked Products, then add products to Upsells or Cross-sells. Upsells are alternatives shown on the product page, while cross-sells are complementary products commonly shown in the cart.

WooCommerce also generates related products from shared categories and tags. This is useful when you can maintain sensible catalogue structure, but it is not personalised to an individual shopper, and the output is sorted randomly.

The native method is fine when you have a focused catalogue and only need a few carefully chosen recommendations. It becomes difficult when every product needs different links, when you want recommendations based on browsing or purchase history, or when you need one rule to apply across many products.

Do not describe category matches as behavioural personalisation. WooCommerce core does not build a shopper-specific recommendation profile from views and purchases. You need an extension or custom development for that level of targeting.

Choose a WooCommerce recommendation plugin that records the signals you need and supports the placements you want. Check whether it can use order history, views, cart contents, customer history or other first-party store data, and whether it can exclude out-of-stock or unavailable products.

Expect a short cold-start period. Recommendation engines may need order or view data before they can return useful results; some generate their first results when an engine is viewed on the front end.

Start with one or two rules rather than placing recommendation blocks everywhere. A practical setup is Customers who bought this also bought on product pages, complementary cross-sells in the cart, and recently viewed products for returning visitors.

Set a sensible limit, remove the current product from its own results, exclude unavailable products and avoid recommending items the customer has just bought unless repeat purchases make sense. If your tool tracks views or clicks, review its consent and cookie settings before enabling tracking.

Test recommendations as a guest, a logged-in customer and a customer with order history. Check the product page, cart, checkout and thank-you page on mobile as well as desktop.

If a block is empty, check that the store has enough data, the rule has eligible products, the products are purchasable and the theme still includes the WooCommerce display locations used by the extension. A theme builder or custom template can remove those locations, so the recommendation rule may be working while its output has nowhere to appear.

Fast way: For behaviour-based recommendations without maintaining product links by hand, use WPC Smart Recommendations Premium. It fits stores that want co-purchase, co-view, wishlist, trending, recently viewed and manual recommendation rules in one WooCommerce tool.