One of the best technologies to boost sales for e-commerce today are recommendation systems. But how could you add a recommendation engine to your woocommerce website? You’re at the right place. First we will define what recommendation engines are, then we can establish strategies and solutions to add recommendation engines to Woocommerce.
What is a recommendation engine?
A recommendation engine, also called a recommender system, will suggest (or recommend) items that it predicts users will be inclined to view or buy. These predictions are based on patterns of users’ past behaviors and preferences.
This technology is based on personalization and is closely related to personalized search.
What are the benefits of a recommendation engine for Woocommerce?
Recommendations greatly boosts sales (conversions), user engagement and product discovery. This boosts sales because the items that the visitor will browse through have been tailored to their tastes, but also boosts user engagement since they don’t have to search for the interesting items, instead they passively receive a constant stream of relevant content.
It will also ensure that all your products are visible to the visitors, rather than being buried deep within multiple pages of pagination.
Top recommendation engines
Recombee
Recombee is an AI recommender that provides personalized search and recommendations (and even email). You can integrate it with an easy to use PHP client. You could check out our guide on how to build a Recommendation system using Recombee.
This is a more specialized recommender since it only offers personalization. No simple keyword search , facets (filters) or other things.
It is also probably the most affordable solution since it’s free tier offers lots of features and very generous limitations (up to 100 000 recommendations per month for free).
You could check out our detailed Recombee review.
Algolia
Algolia is a multipurpose provider : it offers all types of search (keyword, AI, personalized), facets and recommendations. It is more pricy than Recombee for small websites but it allows you to equip your WordPress/Woocommerce website with a full search experience on top of recommendations for the same price.
Google Retail
Google Retail includes Retail search and recommendations. You can trust Google with your search & recommendations since they host the most popular search engine world-wide.
Google sets it’s prices based on usage only ($2.50 per 1000 searches and $0.27 per 1000 recommendations).
Amazon Personalize
Amazon personalize is an AI recommender that provides personalized search & recommendations. Amazon hosts the most popular e-commerce website in the world so using their recommendations for your own website might not be a bad idea, if you can afford it ($0.05 per 1000 recommendations).
Metarank
Metarank is an open-source ranking service. It can provide both personalized search and recommendations by personalizing the results based on the users’ past actions. Since it is open-source, you could integrate it into your Woocommerce for free.
Vespa
Vespa is an open-source multipurpose engine that can provide search (keyword and vector), personalization and recommendations, chatbots and many other features. You could build your recommendation system for free using Vespa which provides very detailed documentation.
How to add a recommendation engine to your Woocommerce
Yourself using PHP
You could integrate all of the previously mentioned recommendation engines into your Woocommerce website using their REST APIs and/or PHP clients.
Build your first recommendation system using Recombee and PHP in less than 30 minutes.
Using a WordPress plugin
Adding recommendations to your WordPress or Woocommerce website yourself can be a difficult task.
You could instead use our search & recommendations plugin : WPSolr.
It can integrate many search & recommendations engines (Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, Opensearch, Algolia, Weavaite, Google Retail, Recombee, Vespa) into any WordPress & Woocommerce website to add invaluable features such as search, Ajax search, facets, RAG, recommendations and much more.
You could also check out our top 5 list of recommendation plugins for WordPress & Woocommerce.
