Two types of customers can bring in revenue for your eCommerce store: Existing customers and new customers. You can increase your sales in both cases by providing relevant and helpful product recommendations through upsells and cross-sells.
What is the difference between an upsell and a cross-sell in a sales transaction?
An upsell is simply offering the same product but at a higher price. It could be a stronger, more feature-rich, or larger version of the product. Takeout restaurants often offer upsells like “Would You Like to Upgrade to a Larger Size?”
Cross-selling is when you provide additional product recommendations to complement your original purchase. Upsells can be applied to different versions of the same product. Cross-sells can be applied to products that are not the same.
Your business may be able to double your revenue by consistently upselling or cross-selling with existing and new customers. This time-tested marketing strategy is a must-have for any business.
5 Tips and Tricks for Cross-selling and Upselling
These are five ways to increase revenue from cross-selling and upselling.
1. Make it Relevant
The first and most important thing is that any extra features or products you suggest as upsells or cross-sells must relate to the original purchase. Cross-selling toilet cleaners with yogurt customers who have purchased them online is not a good idea.
Buyers should be able to see the natural connection between the product they are buying and the options you offer.
2. Make it Helpful
A place to store your steak knives is a great thing for someone who buys a set. It’s not only relevant but also helpful to cross-sell them with decorative steak knife holders. By solving two problems simultaneously, you make life easier.
You can also offer a bonus set or cutlery as an upsell. You’re also helping by offering a relevant offer.
3. Make it Desirable
Neil Patel suggests a 3-fold approach to cross-selling and upselling. Your upsells should be the most reviewed, relevant, or highest-selling products or services.
Why? These are your most desired products. These products are likely to be more popular with your existing customers because so many people have reviewed them.
4. Urgent
You should limit the availability of any product or service when possible.
The urgency to purchase now is increased when a service-based or client-based company can accept only 12 private clients.
Products with a limited shelf-life are possible for product-based businesses. Certain food products may only be available during certain seasons you may haveve limited production of a product. You might have stopped making a particular product or modified it from the original. This means that the remaining supply of the original product is your last chance to purchase it.
These are the rare and exclusive opportunities you should highlight in your cross-sell or upsell offers. This is the “use it or lose” concept.
5. Make it Easy
This has two sides. Both you and the customer should find it easy.
Make it easy for the customer to take up the offer. You don’t have to require customers to sign up for a membership to take advantage of the offer. Make it as easy for them as possible.
To fully harness the power of cross-selling and upselling, you can add an extension to your eCommerce store that makes this process even simpler.
Let’s look at a powerful extension to your eCommerce cross-selling and upselling strategy.
Product recommendations can help increase your eCommerce revenue
If someone buys lipstick from an eCommerce store that sells beauty items, you can offer cross-selling products such as products labeled ‘face’ and ‘eyes’. Or however, you think it is best to categorize your products.
This means that you only need to tag and categorize your products once. You can quickly add a product to your catalog and create cross-sell or upsell recommendations.
Once you have the foundation of tags and categories in place, it is now possible to execute the following strategies in a very short time.
Recommends Products From Recently Viewed Categories
A person who looks at multiple pages of notebooks products is looking for notebooks. You can assume that they are looking for office or school supplies if they also view pages for tape, pens, and lined paper.
You might just find the product they are looking for by recommending products from other categories they may not have seen. This will make their shopping experience more enjoyable.
Select Which Pages You Want to Offer Product Upsells or Cross-sells
Your site can be set up to provide recommendations in multiple places.
- Pages for product and category
- Visit the checkout page
- Confirmation page for order
These are the recommended products for the checkout page if you already have a T-shirt in your cart. The category process is shown here. Each product corresponds to the one that was added to your cart. These products could be of interest to someone who is buying a volleyball shirt.
Top Rated Cross-sells and Upsells
Patel’s advice is still relevant. The best upsells and cross-sells are made with the most popular, reviewed, and relevant products.
You can recommend the most popular products to your customers by using Product Recommendations.
Help your customers complete the package
You can encourage customers to purchase relevant products by using language such as “Complete the Look” or “Frequently Bought together”.
A person who purchases yoga pants online may also need to purchase workout shoes.
You can recommend a combination of products to people who have added one of these products to their carts if you see them often in your analytics.
Tell them what they forgot
You can track what visitors have viewed during a shopping session with Product Recommendations. You can create a “Leave These Behind?” recommendation for products that they have viewed, but not added to their cart. This will remind them of what they saw.
This strategy will increase your average order amount and will be appreciated by your customers.
Remind them to Consider
You can access the Order Confirmation page by tapping in and asking “Still looking for …?”,” to list the products that they viewed, but did not purchase.
Even if only 1% of your customers decide to return to the store and buy additional products, wouldn’t it be worth it? It all runs automatically once the process is automated and set up.
These recommendations can be tailored to the products they have purchased. Your customer will have to re-enter the purchase process. You can encourage them to continue the climb by offering one-time coupons and discounts. You can save 10% on any of these products if you have already purchase on it.
Get Free Shipping to Inspire More Spending
This is how it looks in an eCommerce coffee shop:
You’re offering your customers an attractive incentive to spend more by adding $44.98 to their cart to get free shipping. Free shipping is a favorite among online buyers. You can get lots of buyers if you give them a dollar amount to redeem free shipping.
Encourage Impulse Purchases
Do you remember to make it urgent? This is one of the best motivators to cross-sell and upsell.
This can be done by suggesting “Last Minute Deals”, which you can do in the Product Recommendations extension. This is the place to list items that are out of stock or offer time-limited, date-specific specials such as holiday deals.
Track your Analytics
Product Recommendations also include all the analytics that you need to optimize any strategy you choose to use.
It is possible to measure your revenue, views, and clicks as well as conversion rates for each product page. Other metrics can be calculated, such as average transaction size.
This data will help you quickly identify the most popular sellers, those that get a lot more views but not many buyers, your biggest money-makers, and your worst missteps.
This data can be used to make more effective cross-sell and upsell recommendations.
Cross-selling and upselling are possible with
Timing is everything in successful upselling and cross-selling.
A coupon offer that is given to a visitor when they first visit your site will generate a different response than an upsell at the checkout page.
The Product Recommendations Extension makes it easy to present upsells or cross-sells when most shoppers are likely to take action.
