The trend of online shopping is increasing day in and day out. The two main factors boosting the online shopping stores today is the shortage of time and attractive offers. From tangible to intangible items, almost all products can be purchased from online stores now.
But you might be worried, how to make your store more attractive for customers. A captivating eye store can increase sales and make your business more profitable.
No doubt, traditional marketing strategies, like advertising and running discounted offers still works, but this is the era focused on consumer behavior. Henceforth, you need to understand the nature of your customers and craft your store accordingly.
To craft a more productive store, first of all, you need to understand WooCommerce product categories, tags and attributes. It will help you in ranking your store in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Aside from SERP, it is also used to show similar products in WooCommerce store.
Related Products in WooCommerce
For example, if you have a category for shirts, all products related to shirts will lie in this category. So, when a visitor is viewing any shirt, he will also see few numbers of shirts shown as related products in shirts category. This provides the customer a variety of products in the same category.
What are Custom Related Products in WooCommerce?
Don’t get confused with the word “Custom” in related products. The concept is pretty much similar to that of related products, but here, the related products are chosen by the store owner themselves.
How do Custom Related Products in WooCommerce help in Increasing Sales?
You might have observed in some online grocery stores that wherever you see an advert for bread, right adjacent to it, you will also find butter. Why?
Although, bread, and butter may not fall in the same category; however, they are cross-linked to each other. It is a common practice that people have butter when they are usually purchasing bread. In older days, people tend to shift perceptions from one product to another briskly, leading to a gradual decline of a particular product that is either far down in the list or is not commonly purchased by the majority buyers. Now consumers tend to pick out things that give them an extra cross offer.
All this, such as adding advert of butter besides bread, is one of the many examples how Custom Related Products in WooCommerce can boost your sales if you are an owner of an online grocery store. The analogy can be applied to different businesses accordingly. Consumer behavior plays a vital role and hence it is necessary that one should keep in mind that if a customer is visiting their store, it is eminent that he will seek butter as well if he is finding bread to purchase. Regardless, they belong to the same category or not.
Integrate Custom Related Products to WooCommerce
Let’s see how we can integrate Custom Related Products in our online WooCommerce store. In my example, I will be using Custom Related Products for WooCommerce Plugin. You can get it from here. Please make sure, you have installed WooCommerce on an optimized WooCommerce Hosting.
Login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard and navigate to Plugins -> Add New and search for Custom Related Products for WooCommerce from the right side search bar. Install and Activate it.
Before doing anything, let me describe my settings to be tested in this example.
- Total Number of Products: 6
- Bread: 3 (Category Bread)
- Butter: 3 (Category Butter)
Without setting up custom related products in WooCommerce, we can expect that once a visitor visits the details page of any bread, he can see a few number of other related products (bread) as they all belong to the same category.
What we are going to do is, add butter 1 with bread 1, so that if a customer is going to buy bread, he might end up buying the butter too.
Once you are done with the successful installation of the plugin, navigate to Products -> Add Product or edit any existing product. In my example, I used Bread 1. Scroll down a bit, and navigate to Linked Products. You will now observe that a new text field is added in this section named as Custom Related Products.
Start typing the name of the product that you want to list along with the editing product. I’ve chosen Butter 1. Then simply update the product.
Now, visit your product page, and you will observe your customized related product is appended like the image below.
Hurrah! You are done.
What, If I Do Not Select Any Custom Product?
I know, you might be thinking of this. But, don’t worry, the plugin allows you to control this. Navigate to WooCommerce -> Custom Related Products and you have your answer.
Will It Work Vice-Versa?
No! You have to set custom products on both products manually.
How Many Custom Products I Can Add on Any Product?
There is no limit to add WooCommerce custom related products. It depends on your theme, how many related products do you allow it to be shown. For example, you have chosen five WooCommerce custom related products, but your theme allows only three related products to be displayed at a time. You need to increase the number of relevant products to be displayed in your theme.
If you have any more questions? Feel free to ask by using the comment section below. I would love to answer them 🙂
Mustaasam Saleem
Mustaasam is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. Where he actively works and loves sharing his knowledge with the WordPress Community. When he is not working, you can find him playing squash with his friends, or defending in Football, and listening to music.