The short version
When a shopper views a product, the plugin looks for qualifying orders that included it. It identifies the other products from those same orders, ranks the strongest relationships, removes ineligible candidates, then fills any remaining space with your chosen fallback when needed.
1. Find qualifying orders
The plugin starts with recent WooCommerce orders that fit the history period and order statuses selected in Settings. It then looks for orders containing the product currently being viewed.
- Use the configured history period and qualifying order statuses.
- Find qualifying orders that contain the source product.
- Collect the other products customers purchased in those same orders.
2. Rank shared-order relationships
Candidate products are ranked by how many distinct qualifying orders they share with the source product. You can require a minimum number of shared orders before the plugin uses a relationship.
Real co-purchase signalMore shared qualifying orders make a candidate relationship stronger.
Merchant controlYour history, matching, and threshold settings decide how broad or selective the pool should be.3. Keep only eligible products
Before a candidate can be returned, Smart Related Products filters out products that are unavailable, hidden, unpublished, out of stock, non-purchasable, excluded, duplicated, or outside an enabled category or tag rule. Product-level controls can also change the mode for an individual source product.
4. Use a fallback when needed
If smart recommendations do not provide enough eligible products, the plugin can show nothing, retain WooCommerce’s default related products, or use relevant best sellers or newest products from the selected category or tag context.
- Use fallbacks for products with limited co-purchase history.
- Use product-level modes when a product needs WooCommerce defaults, manual products, or no related products.
- Review the saved preview in the product editor to see the current selection source.
Next steps
Go deeper into the parts of the recommendation flow that matter most for your store.
