Recommend Top Rated Products in Category Pages

This guide shows you how to use WooCommerce Product Recommendations to recommend Top Rated products in your store’s category pages. The recommendations will include top rated products from the currently viewed category.

Plugins/Extensions Used

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• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Product Recommendations
• Storefront

Configuration

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Create a “Top Rated” Engine

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1. Create an Engine
   • Go to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Engines and click Create new.
   • Under Title, enter “Top Rated”.
   • Choose the Product Archive Engine Type.
2. Add Filters
   • Locate the Filters section in the Engine Configuration panel.
   • Add a Current Category Filter.
   • Select any to recommend products from the currently viewed category.
3. Add Amplifiers
   • Go to the Amplifiers section.
   • Add a Rating Amplifier to favor your store’s best-rated products in the generated recommendations.
   • Choose the high to low option.
4. Save the EngineClick the Create button to save the Engine you just configured.

Deploy the “Top Rated” Engine

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1. 1. Deploy the EngineClick Deploy in the message that appears after saving the Engine. Alternatively:
      • Navigate to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations.
      • Search for and select the “Top Rated” Engine.
      • Click the Deploy button.
   2. Configure Display Settings
      • In the Title field, enter “Top Rated”. This will be displayed above the recommended products.
      • Select a number of Product columns and Product rows for the product recommendations. Use the default settings to display a single row of 4 products.
   3. Choose LocationSelect the Location where you’d like the recommendations to appear. To display the recommendations at the top of our category archive pages, choose Product Archive > Before Products.
   4. Add Visibility ConditionsTo recommend “Top Rated” products in specific category archives, add a Visibility Condition:
      • Go to the Visibility Conditions section.
      • Add an Archive Category condition.
      • In the dropdown that appears, select in.
      • Add one or more categories in the last field. In this example, we added the Accessories category.

1. Finalize the DeploymentClick Deploy to deploy this Engine to the specified Location.

Result

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Making Changes

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To edit the configuration of the “Top Rated” Engine:

1. Navigate to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Engines.
2. Locate and Edit the “Top Rated” Engine.
3. Update the Engine to save your changes.

To edit the Display Settings, Location, or Visibility Conditions of the “Top Rated” Engine deployment:

1. Navigate to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations.
2. Go to the Product Archive section.
3. Click the Before Products tab.
4. Expand the “Top Rated” Engine deployment and make changes as needed.
5. Save your changes.

If you have only deployed a few Engines on your site, you may find it easier to locate and edit the “Top Rated” Engine deployment by navigating to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations > Overview.

Notes

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The “Top Rated” Engine will generate product recommendations only if there are at least a few products with reviews in the currently viewed category archive. If your products have not received enough (or any) reviews yet, you may want to add a Popularity Amplifier as a fallback. Then:

1. Use the +/- buttons to give the Popularity Amplifier a lower weight. This ensures that, as new reviews are coming in, products with ratings will be “boosted” more than products that sell well. This will depend on the weight difference of the two Amplifiers.
2. To minimize the influence of the Popularity Amplifier, give it a weight value of 1, and increase the the weight of the Rating Amplifier to 5.

Notes on Full Page Caching

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If your server is configured to serve cached content/pages, certain recommendation engines deployed in catalog/product pages may:

• fail to display dynamic, personalized, or conditional content; or even
• not be rendered at all.

To get these recommendations to display properly for visitors without an active session, you can use an alternative method for rendering recommendations that will bypass your server’s page cache on these pages:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Recommendations.
2. Locate the Deployments rendering > Use AJAX option and enable it.

Note that enabling this option may introduce a noticeable delay between the time that a page has fully loaded and the time that recommendations become visible to visitors without an active session. This delay will depend on the speed of your server, and the quality of your each visitor’s network connection. If this is an issue, the next option is to completely disable the page caching features enabled on your site/server (not recommended!).

Questions & Support

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