Chandler Olson
July 21, 2023
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If you’re reading this article, you may be a Shopify store owner looking to implement upselling and cross-selling on your eCommerce site. (Or you might just be a competitor peeping on our marketing materials. Either way, all are welcome here.) But before you actually start upselling and cross-selling on your eCommerce site, you have to remember one thing: Upselling and cross-selling come in many shapes and sizes, aka there are many ways to upsell and cross-sell.
Read on to learn more about what upselling and cross-selling are and the various ways you can implement them in your Shopify store.
Upselling is when you sell an upgraded version of an existing product to a customer. For example, it’s like suggesting a customer upgrade to a computer with more storage for a higher price, or suggesting they add insurance to their existing purchase.
Cross-selling, on the other hand, is when you suggest a complementary product to a customer. It’s like adding a case to a laptop or suggesting that a customer also buy a mouse.
Upselling and cross-selling are super common sales tactics, and they’re surefire ways to increase customer satisfaction, average order value (AOV), overall sales, and revenue.
If you’ve ever noticed a small cart that slides out onto a webpage after you add an item to your shopping cart, that’s called an Ajax cart. Upselling “suggested items” directly in this cart is an extremely savvy strategy to implement on your eCommerce site. Why? For several reasons.
First, it grabs customers’ attention. The action of this small side-cart sliding out into your view is in itself attention-grabbing, which means customers are guaranteed to peep the other “suggested items” below their already-selected items.
Second, customers are already intending to purchase. Thus, since they’ve already committed themselves to the checkout process, this means that they’ll likely be more easily convinced to add other items to their cart. They’ll be especially convinced if these suggested items enhance their already-intended purchase.
In addition to adding suggested upsells to the pop-out Ajax cart, you can also add them directly to a customer’s actual shopping cart. Since customers are already intending to purchase (just like with the Ajax cart), suggesting items here is a potentially easy extra sale. Plus, it’s your last chance to drive up a customer’s cart value—why not just give it a try?
Aside from placing upsell and cross-sell suggestions directly in a customer’s cart, you can also add them to a PDP, or product page. You’ve probably noticed this kind of placement for yourself in your own shopping experiences.
The product page upsell is nice because it usually blends in with the existing product page. It’s often less loud or attention-grabbing, but it provides the customer with a seamless shopping experience.
A discount upsell is when you offer your customers a discount when they add additional products to their orders. It’s like “unlocking” 10% off when you spend $50 or more, or getting free shipping with the addition of a certain item. It’s a win-win for you (more sales) and your customer (getting a discount).
The benefits of discount upselling are plenty.
Like upselling in the Ajax cart, the discount upsell only occurs when customers have added something to their cart—when they have an intent to buy. This means that adding an additional item to their cart is less of a barrier. Even more, this kind of upsell comes with a high incentive—a discount! It’s a pretty surefire way to drive not only AOV, but customer satisfaction, too.
A bundle cross-sell is when you suggest complimentary items that would create a perfect bundle. Think: when you’re shopping on Amazon, add something to your cart, and are greeted with “would you also like to add” pop-up.
This kind of upsell is smart for items that are extremely complementary. For example, if you buy a poop bag holder for your dog, you’ll probably need poop bags, or if you buy a new phone, you’ll probably need a phone case. Bundle cross-sells are often easy layups in terms of sales since the products are so complimentary, and they enhance the customer’s shopping experience, too.
The quantity discount bundle is similar to both the bundle offer and the discount upsell in that you suggest complementary products that would “round out” a bundle, but with a quantity discount—i.e. “Add two for 15% off.” It’s an extremely attractive offer, both because of the complementary nature of the suggested items and—of course—because of the discount.
Want to start adding all of these upselling and cross-selling strategies to your eCommerce store? Lucky for you, implementing them is easy with the InCart Upsell app.
The InCart Upsell & Cross-Sell app, which uses AI to recommend products that your customers are most likely to buy, makes upselling and cross-selling on product pages during checkout easy.
Try it out for free today and start seeing improvements to your AOV and site conversions tomorrow.
