Solution for upsell products in product descriptions

[Russ]

Cubists!

I am working like a navvy to move from CC 4.3.4 to CC 6.5. It ain't easy…

One of my challenges is ‘upsell product’ migration.  Many of my products (notebooks, the paper kind) have accessory products (dividers, business card pockets, bookmarks etc) that people will buy if they know they exist, but wont look for if they don’t already know about them.

To assist my customers achieve greater product satisfaction (and to deliver larger sale, as a mere by-product, you inderstand) my product descriptions have a copied-and-pasted block that starts with  “You may want to consider souping up your notebook with these fine accessories”  and then lists a bunch of links relevant to this particular product.

In my old store, I just copied and pasted the appropriate list into the books’ descriptions. This creates a bit of an overhead when I wake up at 3am having thought of something else that should be assigned to a particular product group - I have to track the all candidates down one-by-one and update them individually.

This raises two inconveniences:

1. The links will change when I move into my new store (they are currently of the form “catid=66” wheres presumably the new store will have seo-friendly URLs);
2. There is a lot of duplication - there ate maybe six or seven variations on the optional products lists, but they are duplicated - every notebook description has its own copy so there are hundreds of dups.

Can anyone suggest a solution to this? For item 2, it would be nice, for e.g., to be able to put something like an ‘include’ clause into the description that loads a shared document so all products that take the same accessories get the links at runtime from a single source document.  

The first problem is probably unavoidable, unless the 6.5 can handle olde-style “catid” references as well as the SEO-friendlys.  But maybe it can?  This would allow me some flexibility after go-live and potentially avoid a mess of broken links.

Here’s hoping!

Thanks in advance for your help,

Russ

[bsmither]

This plugin may be of interest:

https://www.cubecart.com/extensions/plugins/related-products-manual-automated-recommendations

Please note that it was last updated in 2018, so you should send a note to the developer to see if a version has been written for PHP8 and that it works for CC6.5.