DF Recently Viewed — Recently viewed products (PrestaShop 8/9)

Overview

DF Recently Viewed (dfrecentlyviewed) displays the products your visitors have recently viewed, but with an architecture designed for conversion: history is stored server-side, merged into the customer account at login, rendered via AJAX so it stays accurate behind a page cache, and enriched with price-drop badges. An analytics dashboard completes the picture with a view-to-purchase conversion rate.

Requirements

• PrestaShop 8.0 to 9.x
• PHP 7.4 to 8.3
• No external dependency (no Composer, no jQuery, no carousel library)

Installation

1. In the back office, open Modules > Module Manager.
2. Click Upload a module and drop the dfrecentlyviewed.zip file.
3. Click Install. The module creates its table, registers its hooks and adds a Catalog > Recently Viewed Stats tab.
4. Click Configure to access the settings.

The module works out of the box with sensible defaults: 8 products, carousel, AJAX rendering, price-drop badges enabled, 90-day retention.

Configuration

Display tab

• Block title — translatable in each of your languages.
• Number of products — from 1 to 24 products displayed in the block.
• Carousel layout — enabled: horizontal carousel with navigation arrows. Disabled: responsive grid.
• Show on product pages — displayFooterProduct hook.
• Show on homepage — displayHome hook.
• Show on cart page — displayShoppingCartFooter hook.
• Show “clear my history” link — recommended for GDPR transparency.

Smart behavior tab

• Exclude the product currently displayed — avoids recommending the page already on screen.
• Hide out-of-stock products — the filter accounts for allowed backorders.
• Hide products already in the cart — the cart is recalculated server-side, never from the cached page.
• Price-drop badges — displays a “-X%” badge when the price has dropped since the visitor last viewed the product.
• AJAX rendering (cache-safe) — strongly recommended, see the dedicated section below.
• History retention (days) — from 1 to 730 days. Older views are purged automatically.

Full-page-cache compatibility

On a shop running Varnish, Cloudflare, LiteSpeed Cache or a CDN, a personalised block rendered server-side gets cached along with the page: the next visitor sees someone else’s history, or an empty block.

The AJAX rendering mode, enabled by default, solves this: the block is injected after the page renders, through a request to the module’s front controller. Product view tracking is sent as a non-blocking beacon, which also works when the page comes from cache.

Only disable AJAX mode if your shop uses no page cache at all. Otherwise the block will display incorrect data.

Price-drop badges

Every time a product page is viewed, the module stores the tax-included price shown at that moment for that specific visitor. When the block is displayed, it compares that remembered price with the current one:

• If the price dropped by at least 1%, a red “↓ -X%” badge appears in the top-left corner of the miniature.
• The remembered price is updated on each new view: the badge therefore always means “the price has dropped since your last visit to this page”.
• If the price goes back up, the badge disappears.

Cross-device history

Views are recorded with the guest identifier (id_guest) for anonymous visitors, and with the customer identifier (id_customer) for logged-in visitors.

At login (actionAuthentication hook), the guest history is merged into the customer account: view counters are summed and the most recent view date is kept. The customer thus finds their viewed products on every device.

“My browsing history” page

The module adds a tile in the customer account (displayCustomerAccount hook) leading to a dedicated page showing up to 48 viewed products, with a clear button if the option is enabled.

Page URL: /module/dfrecentlyviewed/history (rewritten according to your URL configuration).

Widget

The block can be called from any template in your theme:

{widget name='dfrecentlyviewed'}
{widget name='dfrecentlyviewed' limit=6}

The limit parameter is optional and capped at 24; without it, the number configured in the back office applies.

Analytics dashboard

Go to Catalog > Recently Viewed Stats. Over a period of 7, 30, 90 or 365 days you will find:

• Product views — total number of recorded views.
• Distinct products viewed — the real breadth of catalog discovery.
• Unique visitors — guests and customers combined.
• View-to-purchase conversion — percentage of viewed customer/product pairs that led to a valid order placed after the view. Computed on logged-in customers only.
• Most viewed products — ranking with a direct link to the product page in the back office.

GDPR and retention

psgdpr hooks

The module implements actionExportGDPRData and actionDeleteGDPRCustomer: if the official psgdpr module is installed, browsing history is included in the personal data exports and deletions requested by your customers.

Self-service clearing

When the option is enabled, a “Clear my history” link appears next to the block title and on the history page. Visitors can delete their own data, with confirmation.

Automatic purge

Views older than the configured retention period are purged automatically, opportunistically (on roughly 1% of recorded views). No configuration is needed.

Optional CRON

For high-traffic shops, a token-protected purge URL is shown on the configuration page. You can call it daily:

0 4 * * * curl -s "https://your-shop.com/module/dfrecentlyviewed/tracking?action=cleanup&token=YOUR_TOKEN"

Theme integration

Products are rendered through your theme’s native miniature (catalog/_partials/miniatures/product.tpl). The block therefore automatically inherits your listing design: image, name, price, promotion badges, quick-add button if your theme provides one.

If you want to customise the container, override the module templates from your theme:

themes/your-theme/modules/dfrecentlyviewed/views/templates/hook/recentlyviewed.tpl
themes/your-theme/modules/dfrecentlyviewed/views/templates/hook/_products.tpl

Multistore

Histories are isolated per shop: a visitor viewing a product on shop A will not see it appear on shop B. All settings are stored through PrestaShop’s Configuration table, with native multistore support.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling removes the history table, all settings and the statistics tab. A confirmation is requested before the operation.

Troubleshooting

The block does not appear

• Check that the hook matching the page is enabled in the configuration (product page, homepage, cart).
• The block only appears if the visitor has viewed at least one eligible product. A first-time visitor will see nothing.
• If both current-product exclusion and cart exclusion are active, it is possible that no product remains to display.

The block stays empty on a cached page

Make sure AJAX rendering is enabled. Also check that your cache configuration does not intercept requests to /module/dfrecentlyviewed/tracking.

Price-drop badges never appear

The badge can only appear if the visitor viewed the product before the price drop. After changing a price, give visitors time to come back. Also check that the option is enabled.