If you have ever bought anything on Amazon, you already know the pattern even if you never learned its name.
You look at a camera, and right underneath it there is a small row of products: a memory card, a case, an extra battery.
You did not go looking for those things.
They found you at exactly the moment you were already reaching for your wallet.
That row has a name in the ecommerce world: Frequently Bought Together.
It is one of the oldest tricks in online retail, and it still works because it is not really a trick at all.
It is just a good store clerk doing their job well.
A good clerk in a physical shop would mention the matching item, the accessory, the thing that makes what you are already buying better.
The widget is the digital version of that clerk, except it never gets tired, never has an off day, and shows up on every single product page.
The gap in WooCommerce
WooCommerce does not include this out of the box.
There is a “related products” or “cross sell products” block, but it is generated automatically from categories and tags, which means it often shows things that have nothing to do with what the customer actually needs.
A phone case next to a phone from a different product line, or an accessory that does not even fit.
That gap between “generic related items” and “the specific thing that actually goes with this product” is exactly what a Frequently Bought Together plugin is meant to fill.
How the widget actually works
From the shopper’s side
On a product page, the widget displays a small box with the current product and one or more companion products you have chosen, each with an image, a price, and a checkbox.
The shopper ticks the ones they want and adds everything to the cart in a single click, watching the total update in real time as they do.
There is no separate trip to another product page, no re-adding to cart, no lost momentum.
The decision happens right there, in the same window where the shopper was already deciding to buy.
From the store owner’s side
You are not handing this decision over to an algorithm.
In the product editor, you search for and select the specific companion products for each item.
The phone case that fits this phone, the filter that fits this coffee machine, the strap that fits this watch.
That precision is what turns a passive suggestion into an actual sale, because nothing shown to the customer is a guess.
Curated beats generic, every time
The reason curated pairing outperforms an automatic “related products” block comes down to trust.
The first time a shopper sees an obviously wrong suggestion they stop paying attention to the whole section.
A widget built from deliberate, manual pairings never has that problem, because every product in it was chosen by someone who actually knows the catalog.
Getting Started
I built RIACO Frequently Bought Together for WooCommerce around this idea from the ground up.
It lets you pick the companion products for each item in your catalog, choose where the widget appears on the page, and optionally set up an automatic bundle discount so the whole set becomes a small deal in itself.
The plugin is free, works with Storefront WooCommerce theme and newer WordPress theme, and is fully compatible with WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS).
If you want to place the widget somewhere other than the standard product page, the plugin also ships with a simple shortcode:
[fbtwoo_form product_id="42"]If you have never added anything like this to your store, it is worth trying on just a handful of your best-selling products first.
Pick the pairings you already know make sense, the things customers ask about together, or the things you would recommend yourself if someone asked you in person.
That is really all a Frequently Bought Together widget is: the recommendation you would already give, shown at the right moment.