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How to set up Recommended for you, Trending now, On-sale picks and 404 suggestions

12 min read

Recommended for you shows each shopper products picked for them, and Trending now shows what’s selling fastest right now. You place both on a page you choose, such as your homepage. On-sale picks shows, on your product pages, related products that are on sale, and Smart 404 suggestions shows matching products to a shopper who lands on a broken link.

You will learn #

  • How to put Recommended for you and Trending now on a page
  • How to switch on On-sale picks and Smart 404 suggestions
  • How each row picks its products
  • What to do when a row doesn’t show

Before you begin #

  • Run an analysis first. Recommended for you and Trending now fill any gaps in the row with your best-sellers, and Smart 404 suggestions matches the broken address against your product names. The best-seller list and the product names both come from your last analysis. Tendlio runs an analysis every week on its own, and you can start one with Re-scan store at the top of the Dashboard.
  • Turn on Experimental features for On-sale picks and Smart 404 suggestions. Under Settings → General → Experimental & license, switch on Enable experimental features and click Save settings. The Experimental page, where you set up Smart 404 suggestions, then shows in the Tendlio menu. You set up On-sale picks on the Storefront page, but it shows nothing in your shop while Experimental features are off.
  • Look at each row on your store before you rely on it. The rows show on your storefront, so how they fit depends on your theme.

Put Recommended for you or Trending now on a page #

WooCommerce has no standard spot for these two rows, so you place each one with a shortcode.

  1. In your WordPress admin, open Tendlio → Storefront. The Recommendations tab opens first.
  2. Scroll to the Recommended for you panel or the Trending now panel, and turn on its switch: Show a personalized “recommended for you” row or Show a “trending now” row of what’s selling right now. The rest of the panel’s settings appear once the switch is on.
  3. Under Heading, type the title shoppers see above the row. It starts as “Recommended for you” or “Trending now”. If you clear the field, the row shows without a title.
  4. Under How many to show, set how many cards show at once on Desktop and on Mobile. Total to load is how many products the row holds. They start at 6, 2 and 8.
  5. To keep whole categories out of the row, open Exclude categories and tick them. Ticking a category includes its subcategories.
  6. Click Save settings.
  7. Click Copy next to the shortcode, [tendlio_recommended] or [tendlio_trending], and paste it where you want the row: into your homepage or another page, in the block editor or your page builder.

The shortcode also takes two optional settings for the page you paste it on: limit sets how many products load, and title sets the heading, for example [tendlio_recommended limit=”12″ title=”Picked for you”].

Tendlio counts a row as placed once it finds the shortcode in a published page or post. Until then, the row’s card on the Growth engine page reads Off even with the switch on, and its card on the Sales lift page reads On, not placed yet. A shortcode you place only in a theme template or a widget area still shows the row in your shop, but Tendlio doesn’t look there, so the Growth engine card stays at Off.

When a row has nothing to show at all, shoppers don’t see it. If you’re logged in as a store admin, you see a note in its place instead, starting with “Only you can see this (store admin).”

How Recommended for you picks products #

  • For a shopper who’s logged in, the row starts from the products in their last five orders, and shows products your customers buy together with those. These are the same pairs Frequently bought together uses.
  • For a guest, or a logged-in shopper who hasn’t ordered yet, the row starts from what they bought or looked at before in the same browser, or from what’s in their cart.
  • For a guest, the page first shows your best-sellers. Right after it loads, the row swaps in products picked for that shopper, when there’s something to go on.
  • A new visitor with nothing to go on sees your best-sellers, so the row isn’t empty.
  • The picks leave out products already in the shopper’s cart.

To remember what a guest looked at and bought, Tendlio keeps two cookies in their browser for 60 days, each holding up to eight products. If your cookie banner works with the WP Consent API and the shopper declines preference cookies, Tendlio doesn’t keep them. The row then goes by the cart alone, unless the shopper is logged in and has ordered before.

If the pairs have never been built, Tendlio starts building them once you save with Recommended for you switched on. It then keeps them up to date on its own, as described in How to show frequently bought together products on your product pages.

How Trending now picks products #

  • Tendlio ranks products by the units they sold in the last 14 days.
  • A product that sells faster now than it did in the 90 days before those 14 gets a push: its units can be worth up to three times as much in the ranking. If a product had no sales in those 90 days, for example because you added it recently, it gets the full push.
  • A product needs at least 3 units sold in the last 14 days to count as trending.
  • When fewer products qualify than the row holds, your best-sellers fill the rest.
  • Every shopper sees the same row. Tendlio works the ranking out again every few hours.

Switch on On-sale picks #

On-sale picks shows, on a product page, related products that are on sale right now. Turn on Experimental features first (see Before you begin).

  1. In Tendlio → Storefront, on the Recommendations tab, find the On-sale picks (product page) panel and turn on Enable on-sale picks on the product page.
  2. Under Position, choose where the row sits on the product page. Below the product summary (recommended) is a wide row under the product’s main details. To see where each spot is, click Preview the layout.
  3. Under Heading, type the title. It starts as “On sale, you might like”.
  4. Under Minimum discount, set how big a discount a product needs before the row shows it. At 0, the row shows anything on sale.
  5. Under Slider layout, set Visible on desktop, Visible on mobile and Products in slider. They start at 6, 2 and 8.
  6. To keep whole categories out, open Exclude categories and tick them.
  7. Click Save settings, then open a few products on your store and look at what the row shows.

How On-sale picks chooses products #

The row starts with the products shoppers buy together with the one on the page. Then it adds products that share a tag with it, then products whose names share words with its name, and then products from the same category. It keeps only products that are on sale right now, available to buy and discounted by at least your Minimum discount. If nothing related is on sale, the row doesn’t appear on that page.

In Advanced mode, three more settings shape the matches:

  • Match breadth: how far the row looks past the products bought together. Strict adds only products with shared tags and may show nothing, Balanced also adds name matches, and Wide, where it starts, also adds products from the same category.
  • Use tags: turn tag matching off if broad tags, like “sale” or “new”, pull in unrelated products.
  • Words to ignore when matching: name matching skips the words on the shared list you edit in the In-stock alternatives panel.

Switch on Smart 404 suggestions #

Smart 404 suggestions shows matching products to a shopper who opens a link to a page that doesn’t exist. Turn on Experimental features first (see Before you begin).

  1. Open Tendlio → Experimental, and click Smart 404 suggestions to open its panel.
  2. Turn on Suggest in-stock products on broken links.
  3. Under Placement, leave Add it automatically to the 404 page on, or turn it off to place the row yourself (see below).
  4. Under Heading, type the title. It starts as “You might be looking for”.
  5. Under How many to show, set how many products the row shows, from 2 to 20. It starts at 8.
  6. Click Save.
  7. Open a broken link on your store, for example your shop’s address followed by a made-up product name, and see where the row sits.

With Add it automatically to the 404 page on, Tendlio adds the row at the end of the page. Where that lands depends on your theme, and on some themes it’s below the footer. To show the row right under your 404 message, turn Add it automatically to the 404 page off, and paste [tendlio_404_suggestions] into your 404 template, wherever your theme or page builder lets you edit it. With automatic placement off, the row shows only where you’ve placed the shortcode.

How Smart 404 suggestions chooses products #

The row reads the last part of the broken address, takes its words of three letters or more, and looks for products whose names contain them. If fewer products match than the row holds, your fastest-selling products fill the rest. It shows only products that are visible in your catalog, in stock and can be bought.

Tip: If the same broken address keeps getting visits, for example the address of a product you deleted, set up a redirect from it to the right page. Smart 404 suggestions is for the broken links you can’t predict.

If a row doesn’t show #

  • Recommended for you or Trending now: check that the switch is on, that the shortcode is on the page, and that the page is published. If you see the “Only you can see this” note, the row has nothing to show yet: run an analysis.
  • On-sale picks: check that Experimental features are on. Then open a product whose related products include something on sale, because the row only shows on those pages. If it still doesn’t show, your theme may skip the spot you chose: under Position, choose Below the whole product area (works with page builders), or Shortcode only (I’ll place it myself) and paste [tendlio_on_sale_picks] into your product page template. The shortcode takes id, limit and title, where id picks the product the row is for.
  • Smart 404 suggestions: check that Experimental features are on and that the panel’s switch is on.

Tendlio also notices when On-sale picks doesn’t show. It watches whether your product pages load the spot you chose for the row. If it hasn’t seen that spot load for a week, counted from when you switched the row on or from when it last showed, the row’s card on the Growth engine and Sales lift pages reads On, but not showing, and a note under Position names the shortcode to place.

Keep products out of the rows #

To keep one product out of every recommendation row, tick it on Products & insights and click Hide from recommendations. The Boost button next to it moves a product up in the rows it belongs to, but doesn’t add it to other rows. Boost and Hide explains both.

The panels at the bottom of the Storefront page apply to these rows too: the Add to cart button icon, Sold-out products and your custom CSS. Smart 404 suggestions always leaves sold-out products out, even when Show sold-out products in the rows is on.

Why the rows work this way #

Guests see your best-sellers first #

If your shop uses page caching, every guest gets the same saved copy of a page. If Tendlio built one guest’s picks into that page, the next guest would see them. So the page itself carries your best-sellers, and each guest’s own picks arrive after the page loads.

Trending now isn’t your best-seller list #

Your best-sellers are ranked by what they sold in the last 12 months, as your last analysis counted them, so a product that started selling well two weeks ago can take months to reach the top of that list. Trending now looks at the last 14 days and pushes up what’s selling faster than before, so a seasonal product or a new one shows while it’s selling.

See what the rows earn #

Recommended for you, Trending now and On-sale picks each have a card on the Growth engine page that shows what they brought in. Smart 404 suggestions has no card there: its results are on the Sales lift page and in the Storefront widgets report, as 404 page suggestions. For the details, product by product, click See report at the top of the Storefront page.

Additional resources #

Frequently asked questions #

Can I put Recommended for you on a product page? #

Yes. Paste [tendlio_recommended] wherever you want it, including a product page template. It picks for the shopper, not for the product on the page.

Why does my 404 row show below the footer? #

With automatic placement on, Tendlio adds the row at the end of the page, and some themes put that below the footer. Turn automatic placement off and paste [tendlio_404_suggestions] into your 404 template instead.

Why is On-sale picks missing on some products? #

The row shows only when a related product is on sale and meets your minimum discount. If nothing related is on sale, it stays off that page.

Updated on September 28, 2026