How to Add Frequently Bought Together to WooCommerce

Trying to set up WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together products on your store?

Popularized by Amazon, displaying a Frequently Bought Together product box is a great way to boost your WooCommerce store’s revenue by encouraging shoppers to purchase more items and increase the size of their orders.

While WooCommerce does include some basic cross-selling features in the core plugin, it lacks any built-in functionality to display Frequently Bought Together products.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn a code-free way to fix that limitation with the Merchant plugin.

With Merchant, you’ll be able to easily create your own customizable Frequently Bought Together product boxes that look something like below:

In addition to displaying Frequently Bought Together products on single product pages, Merchant also gives you the option to display these offers in other areas of your WooCommerce store:

• Cart page
• Checkout page
• Thank You page (this lets you set up a post-purchase upsell)

Beyond the option to enable or disable different display locations, you’ll also get lots of customization settings to adapt this feature to your store, including the following:

• Create unlimited Frequently Bought Together offers, each with its own unique settings.
• Use triggers to control when to display offers.
• Offer a fixed or percentage discount if shoppers purchase the other products (sort of like a product bundle discount).
• Add user conditions so that only certain user roles, or even individual user accounts, will see the offer.
• Customize all of the text content that relates to the offer, including using merge tags to dynamically insert information (such as the total savings that a shopper will receive if they purchase a discounted bundle).
• Adjust the colors and styling of your Frequently Bought Together product boxes.
• Customize the placement of the box using preset hook locations or by manually placing a shortcode.

A Quick Introduction to the Merchant Plugin

In the introduction, I showed you some of the different customization options that the Merchant plugin gives you for setting up Frequently Bought Together product offers.

One of the things that makes the Merchant plugin unique, though, is that it’s not just a WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together product plugin.

Instead, it’s a modular toolkit of 47+ different features that you can use to increase your store’s revenue and offer a better shopping experience for your customers.

Because these features are 100% modular, you don’t need to worry about any bloat. You can pick and choose exactly which modules you want to use and Merchant will only load the optimized code for those specific features.

While it’s totally fine to just use Merchant to add Frequently Bought Together products to WooCommerce, I think there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll also find other ways to get value from the plugin.

You can browse all of the modules here, but here’s a quick rundown of some of the different modules that you’ll get access to:

• A variety of other upselling, cross-selling, and discounting strategies, including storewide sales, product bundles, bulk/tiered discounts, “Buy X, Get Y” offers, spending goal discounts, free gifts, and more.
• Ways to improve the shopping experience, including product quick view, optimized checkout, wishlists, pre-orders, product waitlists, real-time product search, size charts, improved product reviews, product video or audio, login popups, Shopify-style side cart, recently viewed products, and more.
• Other conversion-boosting tactics, such as live sales notifications, “reasons to buy” lists, countdown timers, stock scarcity, free shipping progress bar, Buy Now button, upsell popups, and more.

Now, let’s get into the actual step-by-step guide on how you can use the Merchant plugin to add Frequently Bought Together product suggestions to WooCommerce.

1. Install Merchant Pro to Add Frequently Bought Together Products in WooCommerce

To begin, you’ll need to install the Merchant Pro plugin on your store.

The Merchant plugin does have a free version that’s available at WordPress.org. However, you’ll need Merchant Pro to access the Frequently Bought Together module and follow this guide.

Merchant Pro licenses start at just $79, which includes access to every single module. You can purchase Merchant Pro by clicking this link.

After you’ve made your purchase, you can download the plugin from your aThemes account area and install it on your WordPress site. 

When you install Merchant Pro, it will launch a short guided setup wizard to set up everything. If you need some help, you can follow our Merchant Pro Quick Start guide.

As part of installing the plugin, I also recommend adding your Merchant Pro license key to the plugin’s settings, as this will let you update the plugin from your dashboard (and also set up automatic updates, if you want). You can add your license key by going to Merchant → Settings and using the License Activation box.

If you’re not ready to make a purchase yet, you can also follow this tutorial by launching a live demo from the Merchant page on our website using the Try Live Demo button:

2. Activate the Frequently Bought Together Module

As I mentioned earlier, Merchant uses a 100% modular approach so that your WooCommerce store stays lightweight and loads fast. That is, Merchant will only load a module’s features if you specifically choose to enable it.

To start, that means that you need to enable the Frequently Bought Together module on your store.

Go to Merchant → Modules in your WordPress dashboard and select the Frequently Bought Together module, which should be listed at the top under Boost Revenue:

On the next screen, click the Enable button to activate the module on your WooCommerce store:

3. Create Your First Frequently Bought Together Bundle

Now, you can use the settings in the Bundle Offers box to create your first Frequently Bought Together product offer.

There are two main parts to creating an offer:

• Configuring the offer, such as which products to include, whether to offer a discount, etc.
• Choosing where to display the offer from the four optional locations, along with customizing each location’s options.

I’ll take you through both parts below.

When you first activate the module, Merchant will automatically create your first offer, so you can just edit that offer to get started.

Configure the Offer

To kick things off, I recommend giving your offer a unique name to help you remember it, as this will be important if you create multiple offers.

Choose Which Products to Display the Offer On

Below that, you can choose which products will trigger the offer. That is, which products you want to display this offer on.

You have four options:

• All products – Display this offer on every single product.
• Specific products – You can search for an individual product by name to choose exactly which product should display this offer.
• Specific categories – You can display this offer on all the products in a category.
• Specific tags – You can display this offer on all the products with a certain tag.

If you choose All products, Specific products, or Specific tags, you’ll also get an option to create an Exclusion List. This allows you to manually exclude certain products.

For example, you could display the offer on all the products in “Category A” except for a certain product that you manually exclude.

Choose Which Products to Include in the Offer

Next, you can choose which products to offer in the Frequently Bought Together products box.

You have two options here:

• Manual Selection – You can manually choose which products to include, which gives you 100% control over exactly which products will appear.
• AI Recommendations – You can use Merchant’s AI engine to automatically include relevant products. If you choose this option, you can control how many additional products to suggest (from 1-5 additional products).

Configure Discount (Optional)

If you want to add some extra encouragement for shoppers to purchase Frequently Bought Together products, Merchant gives you the option to add a bundle discount by enabling the Offer a discount on this bundle toggle.

If you enable it, you’ll get additional options to choose between a Percentage or Fixed discount:

Add User Restrictions (Optional)

Finally, you also have the option to add a User Condition to control which users will see the Frequently Bought Together products.

You have three options:

• All Users – Every single user will see the products.
• Selected Users – You can manually select individual user accounts.
• Selected Roles – You can display the products to every user with a certain role.

If you choose the All Users or Selected Roles options, you’ll also get an option to add an Exclusion List to manually exclude specific users as needed:

Choose Where to Display the Offer

Once you’ve configured your offer, you can choose where to display it on your WooCommerce store.

Merchant supports four different display locations, each of which you can enable or disable according to your preferences:

• Product Single Page
• Cart Page
• Checkout Page
• Thank You Page

Each location gets its own settings area where you can access a few different options, including the following:

• Activate or deactivate that location.
• Choose the specific placement at that location.
• Customize the text content.
• Customize the colors and styles.

Let’s go through the settings for each option, along with a real screenshot of a Frequently Bought Together offer at that location so you have a better idea of what it might look like.

Product Single Page

The Product Single Page location is the only one that’s active by default, though you can deactivate it if you don’t want to use it.

It displays a Frequently Bought Together product box at your chosen location on the single product page. Here’s an example using our Botiga Pro theme:

To start, you can choose the location of the box on the single product page using the Placement on product page option.

Then, you can configure all of the text and colors using the other options:

If you want even more control over the placement, you can also manually place it using a shortcode. 

If you want to do this, you can enable the Use shortcode toggle in the module’s settings and then use the [merchant_module_frequently_bought_together] shortcode.

You can use it in your theme, your page builder, the WordPress Site Editor, etc.

Cart Page

If you enable the Cart Page location, you can display Frequently Bought Together product recommendations on the shopping cart page. Here’s an example of what it might look like using our Botiga Pro theme:

To enable this, set the dropdown to Active.

You’ll then get some additional options to control the text of the offer on the Cart page:

Checkout Page

If you enable the Checkout Page location, you can display products on the checkout form so that shoppers can easily add them to their orders.

Here’s an example of what it might look like:

If you set the Status to Active, you can use the additional options to control the placement and text of the offer:

Thank You Page

Finally, you also have the option to display Frequently Bought Together products on the Thank You Page, which lets you create a post-purchase upsell to promote these products.

With this placement, the recommended products will display after the shopper has completed their order. They then get an option to easily add the additional item(s) to their order.

Here’s an example:

To enable this, set it to Active and then use the additional options to control the exact placement and text of the offer:

4. Create Additional Offers As Needed

As I mentioned earlier, the Merchant plugin lets you create as many Frequently Bought Together offers as you want. Each offer can have its own configuration and placements, which gives you a lot of flexibility.

To add another offer, just click the Add New Bundle button. You can then repeat the steps from above to configure your offer using all of the same options:

If you create a lot of offers, you also might have situations where multiple offers apply to the same products. To choose which offer should take priority, you can use drag and drop to change the order of the offers in the list.

If multiple offers apply to the same products, the offer at the top will take priority over those below it:

Get Started with Frequently Bought Together Products in WooCommerce!

That wraps up our guide on how to add Frequently Bought Together products to WooCommerce using the Merchant plugin.

Not only does Merchant make it easy to create these offers, but it also gives you access to 47+ other features to improve your WooCommerce store and boost your revenue.

And remember — all of these features are 100% modular, so you don’t need to worry about slowing down your store with any modules that you choose not to enable.

If you’re ready to get started, purchase Merchant Pro today.

Colin Newcomer

Colin Newcomer is a freelance writer for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing and WordPress.