How to use an Add to Favorites plugin with WooCommerce

How to use an Add to Favorites plugin with WooCommerce

You can build customer loyalty and enhance the shopping experience by letting them mark products as ‘favorites’. Keep reading to learn how to use a WooCommerce add to favorites plugin to add favorite buttons to your products.

By installing an 'Add to favorites' plugin to WooCommerce, you can:

  • Let customers choose their favorite products and mark them.
  • Create a WooCommerce wishlist or shortlist that they can revisit later.
  • Mark blog posts, recipes, events, or other content that they can go through later.

In this article, I’ll show you how to add favorite buttons to WooCommerce and display them in different parts of your online store.

Why use WooCommerce add to favorites buttons?

A WooCommerce add to favorites plugin is perfect for all types of online stores. Let’s step through a few examples:

  • Grocery stores. If you sell grocery items or products that customers buy regularly, you can use a WooCommerce add to favorites plugin to let customers mark their favorite products. This way, they can easily see the products they buy regularly and add them to their cart quickly. For example, customers might have a specific type of milk, eggs, and sugar in their list of favorite products.
  • Clothing stores and shoe stores. Stores that sell clothes, shoes, and accessories can use a WooCommerce favorite products plugin to let customers select the products they want to purchase. They can use it as a WooCommerce wishlist that has all the products they’d like to buy later.
  • Build your own products. If you sell build your own products like aquariums, skateboards, or PCs, you can let customers add their favorite parts and pieces to a list. This way, they can view the build as they add more items to their cart as they go.
  • Furniture stores. People typically pick out a few different bed frames or console tables when buying furniture online to narrow down their search and make a purchase decision. You can use a WooCommerce add to favorites plugin to make it easier for people to mark their favorites.

An add to favorites plugin is perfect for letting customers pick out their favorite items from your store. It helps narrow down their search and increases the chances of making a sale. They can either buy now after making a list of their favorites, or create a WooCommerce wishlist that they can return to later.

How to add favorite buttons to the product page

Here’s what you need to do to add favorite buttons to WooCommerce product pages in your store:

Favorites settings
  1. Log in to the WordPress admin and head over to PluginsAdd New from the dashboard.
  2. Search for Favorites and you’ll see the plugin by Kyle Phillips in the search results. Install and activate it on your WordPress website.
  3. Go to Settings → Favorites → Display & Post Types and tick the checkbox next to Products to enable favorites for WooCommerce products.
  4. The add to favorites button will now appear on product pages.

Add favorite buttons to the shop and category pages

The free Favorites plugin is great, but it only adds the favorite buttons to the single product pages in your store. This makes it slow for customers as they have to visit a separate page for each product, mark it as a favorite, and then repeat the process for each new product they like. Imagine your customers having to do this on a grocery store - it would take forever!

It’s much faster to display WooCommerce favorite buttons on your main list of products (e.g. the shop and category pages).

You can easily do this by using the Favorites plugin with WooCommerce Product Table. The two plugins work together like this:

  • WooCommerce Product Table - Lists products in a neat table layout on the shop and category pages, complete with add to cart buttons and other useful information.
  • Favorites - Adds a WooCommerce favorites button to the table for each product.

This way, customers can browse your product catalog, mark products as favorites, or add them to their cart. They can make quick comparisons and tick their favorites.

WordPress Favorite Button Plugin

The benefits

The main benefit of adding a favorites button to the table layout is that customers can quickly mark multiple products as favorites. Depending on how you set it up, they can also mark specific product variations as favorites. This is particularly useful if you sell, say, clothes in multiple colors. A customer might want to mark the Red T-shirt as a favorite instead of the t-shirt product.

The best part is that the Favorites plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce Product Table.

Setup instructions

Here’s how you can set this up in WooCommerce:

  1. Get the WooCommerce Product Table plugin:
    1. You’ll receive a license key in the confirmation email.
    2. Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress website.
    3. Activate the license key from the plugin’s Settings page.
  2. Make sure you pay close attention to the following settings:
    1. Tick the boxes to enable the table layout on the Shop and Category pages.
    2. When adding your list of columns, make sure you include the 'description' column. This is where the WooCommerce favorite button will appear in the table.
    3. Enable the 'Shortcodes' option. This ensures that the button appears in the table correctly.
  3. Finally, view the page you added the table on the front-end. You will see a 'Favorite' button in the content column for each WooCommerce product in the table.
WooCommerce add to favorites button

When a customer returns to your store, they will still see their shortlisted products marked as Favorites. If they have an account on your site then then their favorite products will appear even if they re-visit from a different browser or device. For guests, a cookie is stored in their browser so that they can see their Favorite products if they re-visit your store from the same browser.

Add favorite buttons in a quick view lightbox

If you want to add the favorite button in a quick view lightbox on your website, you can do that by using the Favorites plugin with WooCommerce Quick View Pro.

WooCommerce Quick View Pro is compatible with both Favorites and WooCommerce Product Table. This means that you can add the Favorites button in a quick view lightbox that customers can launch directly from the product table.

Favorites button in a quick view lightbox

When you set up WooCommerce Quick View Pro, just make sure you enable the option to include the main product description in the lightbox. That is where the WooCommerce 'Add to Favorites' button will appear.

Alternatively, if you'd rather include the favorite button in the short description then you can do this too. Just add the [favorite_button] shortcode to the product short description and show this in the quick view lightbox.

Either way, customers can add products to their list of favorites when they launch the quick view lightbox. This way, they don’t have to visit the single product page to add the product to their favorites – they can do it from whichever page they’re on!

Where to get the plugins

Favorites - the WooCommerce add to favorites plugin - lets you add a favorite button anywhere in your store. This way, you can let customers add selected products to a favorites list that they can revisit at a later time. To enhance the user experience further, you can use:

  • WooCommerce Product Table to add favorite buttons to a neat, front-end table layout. This way, customers can quickly add multiple products to their favorites list.
  • WooCommerce Quick View Pro to let customers add products to their favorites from a quick view lightbox. It works seamlessly with WooCommerce Product Table, too!

Used alone or together, these WooCommerce plugins enhance the customer’s browsing experience in your online store.

8 Comments

    • Hi chraibi, thank you for the comment. If you're using WooCommerce Prdouct Table, you can click on the table header for the "favorite" column. This will sort the table via favorites. If you need a separate area where your favorites are listed, I recommend looking into the plugin's documentation or checking with their support to see if there is a way to do this. If you have further questions about our plugins, you can also reach us through our Support Center.

  1. Bonjour, je suis très intéressé par votre plugin mais, j'ai déjà configuré ma boutique avec divi et certains plugin du même fournisseur. Serait-il possible de disposer uniquement du module "favoris". Merci pour votre réponse.

    • Hi Yarno, thank you for the comment. The tables can sort based on the Favorites. But since the Favorites buttons are placed inside custom fields, they cannot be used for the dropdown filters above the tables. If you are using Document Library Pro, you can look into using FacetWP to try and filter using Favorites. FacetWP works with custom fields created by ACF. If you have further questions, you can reach us through our Support Center. Cheers.

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