WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 was released yesterday with support for a new block that displays cross-sells for products that are based on the current product in the customer’s cart. For example, if a customer is purchasing a new gardener’s kit, the store may cross-sell gardening gloves as a complementary product.

This is a new feature is only available to users in the cart, as the idea is to catch the customer at the moment of buying and encourage them to purchase additional products. These are not simply best-selling products but rather are carefully curated to be specific to the item in the cart.

Cross-sells will show up beneath the cart’s contents automatically after the store owner identifies them in the product’s “linked products” setting. At the moment, cross-sells are limited to two rows of three products.

Cross-sells show up near the bottom of the cart page before the customer clicks to checkout. This seems like it is squeezed into a crowded place as an afterthought. If you want to make the cross-sells more prominent or change where they appear on the page, it is possible but requires a few extra steps.

WooCommerce Blocks is like the Gutenberg plugin for WooCommerce – it’s a feature plugin that serves as a place to iterate and test new blocks, and get access to bleeding edge features. With this plugin installed, you can enable the block-based cart by deleting the cart shortcode on the cart page and adding the Cart block.

Cross-sells now appear in the block-based cart but it is locked in place and cannot be moved up or down on the page. If you want to customize this block further, you must uncheck the boxes that are disabling movement.

After testing the Cross-Sells block, I found that it is still very limited in how it can be customized. The current experience of this block seems more like a placeholder and it could definitely benefit from more customization options, such as background color options, width adjustment, and the ability to change how the individual products inside the box are displayed. Right now it only has one option to set the number of cross-sells products to display. I was able to move the block to the top of the cart page but could not do much more with it.

The WooCommerce team has requested feedback on the new block and will continue to iterate on it. Version 6.8.0 of WooCommerce Blocks also adds half a dozen fixes and improves compatibility with WooPay.