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It’s obvious when you think about it.
Which products are your customers most likely to purchase on their next visit?
The ones they’ve already looked at!
This is especially true for expensive products they might need to consider carefully before purchasing.
And here’s the good news: showing customers their recently viewed products is easy with the right plugin.
Keep reading to find which plugins you can use to add this feature to your store.
Plugins for recently viewed products
When it comes to showing customers their recently viewed products, there aren’t that many plugins to choose from. In fact, the plugins listed below are the only ones I could find with this feature.
That said, you only need to pick one, and there are some excellent options below.
Here are my top picks for the best recently viewed products WooCommerce plugins.
1. YITH WooCommerce Recently Viewed Products
Plugin Description
YITH WooCommerce Recently Viewed Products is a comprehensive plugin for showing customers their product viewing history.
The best part about this plugin is that you get a ton of flexibility for displaying the recently viewed products. There’s a widget that can be placed into your sidebar or any other widget area and a shortcode that can be copied & pasted into the editor of any product, post, or page. When creating the shortcode, you can choose how to order the products, how many products to display, and whether to include products from the same category, tag, or both.
What makes this WooCommerce plugin even more effective for boosting sales is the built-in email marketing tool. You can send customers an email listing their recently viewed products and a discount code. The email is fully customizable so you can use whatever text and discount you want. As for sending options, this plugin keeps it simple: you’ll choose how many days after their last login you want the email to be sent, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
If you want a premium plugin for displaying recently viewed products, this should be your top choice. The flexibility and inclusion of email marketing tools will make it a valuable addition to your store.
2. Product Recommendations
Plugin Description
Product Recommendations is a complete upselling and cross-selling solution for WooCommerce and includes the ability to show recently viewed products to customers.
What makes this plugin awesome is the variety of promotions it implements. In addition to recently viewed products, you can also use this plugin for related products, frequently bought together products, and best-selling products. You’ll find tons of ways to use this plugin to improve conversions across your store.
Even better, you’ll have total control over where your promotions show up. There are more than 20 locations to choose from including places in your product pages, cart, checkout, categories, and thank you page. On top of all this, there’s also an extremely robust performance reporting dashboard that shows you things like your visits, clicks, and conversions for every product.
The only drawback of this plugin is its complexity. It will take some time to learn how to use all these awesome features on your store, but as long as that’s not an issue for you, Product Recommendations will be a profitable choice.
3. Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce
Plugin Description
Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce is a simple plugin that lets you add a new page to your store that lists all of your visitor’s recently viewed products.
The new page uses the same style and layout as your main shop page but lists recently viewed products only. It works for guests by saving their history in their browser, and for logged-in visitors, it also saves these details in the database for a more permanent solution.
You’ll also get simple admin reports to gauge the effectiveness of your recently viewed products page. In the analytics, you’ll see how many times the page has been viewed as well as how many purchases the page has led to.
While this plugin works fine and the reports are a nice bonus, it doesn’t allow you to list recently viewed products in important places like the cart page and below your product descriptions on product pages. For that reason, you may want to pay the extra cost to get a more robust plugin listed above.
4. Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce (StoreApps)
Plugin Description
Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce by StoreApps is another solid choice for your site. Here’s why.
With this plugin, you’ll get both a widget and shortcode to display your customers’ recently viewed products. This means you can add the recommended products virtually anywhere including your sidebar, after your product descriptions, on the cart page, and more.
The recently viewed products works for both guests and logged-in members because it saves their product history in the browser. For members, their history is also saved to the database so it isn’t lost if they clear their browser cache.
When using the shortcode, there’s a nice variety of options, allowing you to set the number of products displayed, choose their order, and enable a slider so many products can be included at once.
Overall, this is a great WooCommerce recently viewed products plugin with a customizable shortcode and widget.
Which “recently viewed” plugin is best?
While any of the plugins listed above could work great for your store, there are two that stood out the most to me.
YITH WooCommerce Recently Viewed Products has everything you need to display and promote recently viewed products, including a built-in email marketing tool. It’s the best option if you want a customizable way to implement this feature in your store.
Product Recommendations is even more robust and can do everything the YITH plugin can do except for email marketing. However, it also includes way more promotion tools. It’s a better choice if you think you might use the other recommendation tactics.
Which one you choose comes down to the needs of your store, but the essential functionality is available in all of these WooCommerce plugins for recently viewed products.
I hope this list helped you find the perfect new plugin for your store, and please share it with the buttons below if you know someone else who might like it.
Thanks for reading!