How to Add “Frequently Bought Together” Recommendations to WooCommerce

When it comes to eCommerce, there’s always more ways to boost your sales.

And the good news is that as a WooCommerce store, you have access to loads of professional plugins that can help.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how Frequently Bought Together recommendations can increase your average order value and discover a plugin that makes this optimization (and others) easy to add to WooCommerce.

But first, let’s cover why this tactic matters in the first place.

How does “Frequently Bought Together” increase eCommerce sales?

Frequently Bought Together (FBT) is a cross-selling tactic used by lots of eCommerce stores.

Here’s an example from Amazon:

They use this tactic for every product they sell, so you can bet it’s effective.

The example above suggests you buy a new television and mount to go with your projector. Another example would be ink to go with a printer, or dress socks to go with new dress shoes.

As you can see, this cross-selling tactic is rather simple and intuitive, and with the right tools, it’s also easy to implement on your own website.

Now that you understand how FBT can be used to increase your sales, let’s talk about how you can implement it today on your WooCommerce store.

How to add a “buy together” feature to WooCommerce

There are a number of Frequently Bought Together plugins available for WooCommerce, but one of the best is the Sales Booster plugin by IconicWP.

Sales Booster makes it easy to hand-pick your FBT recommendations and add discounts. Even better, it has additional cross-selling tools like Order Bumps and an After Checkout page, but more on that later.

Let’s start by installing the Sales Booster plugin.

Install the Sales Booster plugin

You’re probably familiar with how to add plugins from the WP repository, but since Sales Booster is a premium plugin, the installation is just a bit different.

You’ll receive a zip file from Iconic after your purchase, and you can upload this via the Plugins > Add New menu in your WordPress dashboard.

Make sure to click the Upload Plugin button at the top, and then you’ll see the form to select and upload the zip file.

After just a moment, you’ll see the installation was a success and you can click the Activate button to finish adding Sales Booster to your site.

Now let’s move on to the fun stuff.

Add your first recommendation

With the Sales Booster plugin installed, visit your Products menu and select a product.

Scroll down the page and inside the Product Data box, you’ll find a new Sales Booster section.

You’ll find a handful of options here, but the most important one is the Products selector. This is where you’ll choose the products to recommend as frequently bought together. You can begin typing a product name into this field and Sales Booster will find matching products to recommend.

Once you save the new recommended products, visit your product page and you’ll see the Frequently Bought Together section:

The normal “Add to cart” button stays in place, and a new box is added below where shoppers can click one button to add both items to their cart. You can add as many recommended products as you want into the buy together section.

And if you don’t like the position of the box, it can be moved to many other locations via the Settings panel:

One tip: if you want to edit the title to say something besides “Frequently Bought Together”, you’ll likely want to do that from the settings page, so you only have to make this edit once for your entire site. Amazon uses “Buy it with” so they must have tested it and found that converts the best.

It won’t take long to make these recommendations across your site, and then you should see your order values increasing.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, Sales Booster includes two additional tools for increasing your eCommerce store’s revenue. Let’s take a look at those now.

Boost your sales even further

The above techniques will help you promote related products on your site and increase your average order value greatly.

While these features are already enough to make a big impact on your revenue, there are two other novel cross-selling tactics offered by the Sales Booster plugin.

Here’s a brief overview of these two features.

Order Bumps

An Order Bump is a special discounted offer that shows up at the bottom of the checkout page, like this:

If the customer checks the box, the cart contents automatically update with the new item added and the total cost calculated.

You can only display one product to upsell here, but there are a lot of options for deciding which product to display. For example, you can upsell a product based on the contents of the carts, using either product categories or individual products included in the cart. There are also options to include a discount and change the colors of the Order Bump.

Order Bumps are an awesome way to boost your average order value, and you can get as creative as you want with them.

There’s just one more tool you can use to maximize your WooCommerce store’s revenue.

After Checkout popup

After a customer clicks the Buy button, you can show one final offer; a special last-chance deal to get a product at a steep discount before completing the checkout process.

The IconicWP developers have done a nice job with this system. If the shopper clicks the “No thanks, I’ll pass” link, the checkout processes normally. If they click the “Add to My Order” button, the product is added to their order, and payment is accepted right away without any further input. This makes for a very smooth experience, regardless of how your customers react to the upsell.

With After Checkout pages, Order Bumps, and Frequently Bought Together recommendations all running on your site, Sales Booster will quickly pay for itself and more.

How to get started

If you want to learn more about the Sales Booster plugin, you can check it out here:

Learn more about Sales Booster

And if you like this plugin’s style, you may be interested in IconicWP’s WooCommerce Conversions Bundle, which also includes their plugins for checkout optimization and advanced thumbnails:

Learn more about the Conversions Bundle

Getting the bundle instead of buying these plugins individually with save you $108.

Thanks for reading this post to learn how to use Frequently Bought Together recommendations with WooCommerce. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us, and please consider sharing it with the buttons below before you go.