Sharing related products is one of the best ways to optimize your ecommerce product pages for both humans and search engines. Just make sure you keep these recommended product listings uncluttered and relevant, to avoid overloading your customers and pushing them away from your store.
Some of the top ecommerce platforms actually come with related product widgets, using algorithms and your current product offerings to serve up the best solutions when people add different products to their shopping carts.
Since there are so many platforms to choose from, we are going to look at how to add related product widgets in a few of the most popular systems. Which of these will we cover?
- Shopify (read our Shopify reviews as well)
- Bigcommerce (check out our Bigcommerce reviews)
- Volusion (yes we have Volusion reviews)
- WooCommerce (and of course WooCommerce reviews)
Keep in mind that other options have similar procedures for adding related product widgets, so feel free to look at your app or add-on store to see if a solution is available to you. That said, keep reading to learn about how to add related product widgets in your online store.
Adding a Related Product Widget in Shopify
Go to the Shopify App Store and search for Related Products. This provides various packaged solutions, allowing you to recommend products without having to know any code. For example, the Linkcious app uses artificial intelligence to serve up relevant products, running A/B tests in the background and improving your sales. It has a free option, but you could also end up paying up to $69 per month.
A completely free related products widget is the LimeSpot app, which targets customers with certain products they are most likely to buy. Post the related products on your homepage, product pages or anywhere else on your site.
Adding a Related Product Widget in Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce doesn’t have as much control over related products as Shopify, but you can still activate a decent system that shows related products based on what other products your regular customers also looked at. So, it doesn’t particularly target that specific customer, but it runs off of other customer data.
Go to the Settings > Store Setup > Store Settings, and find the Display tab. Scroll down to the checkbox that says “Enable ‘Customers Also Viewed’”. Check this box off to activate it, then specify how many related product you want to show up in the Products Related By Views field.
The Unlimited Upsell app is the closest thing to a Related Products app you can find in the Bigcommerce App Store. Instead of showing a module on the product page, the app reveals a popup with related products once the customer hits the Checkout button.
Adding a Related Product Widget in Volusion
The Volusion platform has a built-in related products function that pulls these products based on categories. In short, if a customer is about to buy a product in a certain category, your website then displays a few other products for sale in the same category.
Go to Inventory > Products > Settings > All Products Settings.
Choose the Show Related Products option to activate the feature. You must click on the Save button in order for this to go into effect. By default, up to five products are shown from the same category. If you don’t have five products in that category it simply reveals how many you have in the category.
This doesn’t give you much flexibility or control, but if you organize your categories properly, it should work out decently for you.
Adding a Related Product Widget in WooCommerce
You have a few methods for adding related products in your WooCommerce store. To start, go to the WooCommerce Extensions Page to search for related product widgets and apps. The Product Details Customiser is a nice place to start, but new apps are always being added, so make your own search to see what fits with your site.
You also have a more customizable option that is built right into the WooCommerce plugin. Go to the Linked Products tab in your WooCommerce admin area. This is where you will edit the product data. You’ll notice that upsells and cross-sells are available, and each of these are somewhat similar to related products. Upsells are related, but they usually make you more money. Cross-sells are recommended in the shopping cart, and they relate to the items already in the cart.
You can search for any products to upsell or cross-sell on the product you are currently looking at. When it comes to showing a Related Products area on your product pages, it all depends on the website template you have implemented. For example, most WordPress templates that are optimized for the WooCommerce plugin have related product widgets built-in.
How does WooCommerce choose the related products? It all depends on the tags and categories you have previously setup. So if an item has the same tag or category as the product that your customer is currently looking at, WooCommerce may choose to display it in the Related Products area.
You may also be wondering how to change the number of products that show up in this area. WooCommerce has a wonderful guide on this page to modify the related product count. You simply have to paste a block of code in your WordPress files and change the number in that code. WooCommerce also provides a block of code to completely remove the Related Products module from your store.
That’s it for learning how to add related product widgets in your online store. Whether using Shopify, Bigcommerce, Volusion or WooCommerce you have a few options to start upselling your customers and bringing in additional sales. Leave a comment in the section below if you have any questions about any of these methods.
Once again, if you aren’t using one of the ecommerce platforms I reviewed above, start by going to your system’s app store to find a related products widget there. If that doesn’t work out, consider searching the company’s support page for assistance.
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