How to do Cross Sells and Upsells
E-commerce best practice is cross sales, up-sells and more.
If you are not currently using cross sells or up-sells and you have any e-commerce store, you definitely need to be. This is a way to, if done correctly almost immediately increase your overall grow sales as much as 10% to 20% or even more.
I often get asked where should you do this. Where is the best place to try and do a cross sell or an up-sell? You know it really is going to require testing and that’s really kind of the bottom line message of this video that if you’re not doing cross sell and up-sells you need to start experimenting with those.
If you don’t have that capability in your shopping cart, you need to get it both to do an up-sell and a cross sell and you need to have a flexibility within your shopping cart to do that in a way that allow some trying out of different methods.
But as far as the best place to do it, you know you can do it as a part of the pre-shopping cart process in your content management system within your category pages or your product pages. You know the places where we’ve seen to be most potent is definitely on the product pages because you know they’re going to be looking at a very specific product so you can give them a very specific cross sell or very specific up-sell.
But it can also work quite well within the shopping cart or both on the product page and within the shopping cart. Now setting up a cross sell or up-sell in the shopping cart or you know on the product page maybe you know relatively easy or maybe fairly complex depending on you shopping cart set up. So that’s something has to be investigated with your e-commerce provider or through your e-commerce developer.
But the bottom line is you want to test out a lot of different types of cross sells and up-sells. Some of the best strategies that we’ve seen are both cross sells and up-sells that are user generated. This is an excellent strategy and Amazon will be a classic example of this.
You know people who look at this also look at this or people who bought this also bought this. If you have enough sales following on your website and also the capability within your e-commerce solution as the data builds up, you can sometimes without having to do a lot of work yourself, end up with some really great cross sell, up-sell options.
Also a lot of shopping cart will allow you to do the user generated cross sell, up-sell and also do a hand pick cross sell, up-sell which can also be really good because you as the business owner or a product manager have a really in depth understanding of product which probably goes well beyond what your typical customer has. So there’s also you know suggestions that you all want to test out or that products, items that really fit well together.
So the idea is if you can test out both formats, both the user generated and the business owner generated and also be able to like, as we spoke about earlier build a test that are various point throughout the process, both in the content management in the shopping cart.
A really great program for testing this out is Google website optimizer. It can be configured to test this out and there’s also that happens to be a free program if you’re not already familiar with that. And there’s also several other analytics testing type offers that can be use and depending on the setup of your shopping cart. Typically, there’s one that will work quite well.
But when it comes to testing and analyzing, so to back up one little spot, so again, you want to do this. You want to test. You want to try things. The reason to set way is this way or that way. I’ll give you some good suggestions here but the bottom line is you want to see what you feel is right for your business and then through user generated content.
See what users are looking at and what users are buying and how this relates to things and ideally have both those in play and then test and in your testing ideally use something like Google website optimizer so you get real test data and you only make decisions based on mathematical significance.
So you have some software that’s helping you to see. You actually show this item with this cross sell this many times and the preference was this item and it’s all in the map and you’re not making decision just base on your gut.
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