Recommend Popular, On-Sale Products in Category Pages

This guide shows you how to use WooCommerce Product Recommendations to add a Hot Selling Deals block of product recommendations in your store’s category pages. The generated recommendations will include trending and on sale 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 “Hot Selling Deals” Engine

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1. Create an Engine
   • Go to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Engines and click Create new.
   • Under Title, enter “Hot Selling Deals”.
   • 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.
   • Add an On Sale Filter.
   • Then, select is to ensure that the engine will recommend on-sale products only.
3. Add Amplifiers
   • Go to the Amplifiers section.
   • Add a Popularity Amplifier to recommend your best-selling products.
   • In the first dropdown, select high to low.
   • In the next one, choose a time interval, for example last 30 days.
4. Save the EngineClick the Create button to save the Engine you just configured.

Deploy the “Hot Selling Deals” Engine

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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 “Hot Selling Deals” Engine.
   • Click the Deploy button.
2. Configure Display Settings
   • Enter a Title to display above the recommended products, such as “Hot Selling Accessories”.
   • 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 your store’s category archive pages, choose Product Archive > Before Products.
4. Add Visibility ConditionsTo offer “Hot Selling” recommendations in specific category archives, add a Visibility Condition:
   • Locate the Visibility Conditions section.
   • Add an Archive Category condition.
   • In the dropdown, select in.
   • Add one or more categories in the last field. In this example, we added the Accessories category.

   

5. Finalize the DeploymentClick Deploy to deploy the “Hot Selling Deals” Engine.

Result

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Making Changes

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To edit the configuration of the “Hot Selling Deals” Engine:

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

To edit the Display Settings, Location, or Visibility Conditions of the “Hot Selling Deals” Engine deployment:

1. Navigate to WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations.
2. Go to the Product Archive section.
3. Click the Before Products tab.
4. Expand the “Hot Selling Deals” 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.

Tips

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Don’t Overdo It

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Adding many recommendations to the same page or Location can reduce their impact and harm your store’s conversion rate. For this reason, Product Recommendations allows you to limit the maximum number of recommendation blocks offered per Location. To control this, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Recommendations and adjust the Recommendation Blocks Limit option. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to keep this value low, between 1 and 3. Remember that the extension prioritizes Engine deployments according to their relative position in the WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations > [Page] > [Location] list. Try to position your best-performing Engine deployments higher, especially if you have entered a low value in the Recommendation Blocks Limit option. The Reports built into the extension will help you identify and prioritize the Engine deployments that perform better than others in the same Location.

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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