Whenever a visitor or target audience is on your WooCommerce store, some simple efforts on your part and the website settings can help you to make more money. With some basic settings, you can implement upselling and cross-selling strategies on your WooCommerce website. This is beneficial for a seller to increase sales and make more revenues while helping the consumers to choose better and needful products.
Upsell vs. Cross-sell- What is the Difference
Upsell: When a buyer is browsing your online store for a product, you can show them a series of products from the same category having more enhanced features, offering greater functionality, etc. Of course, this comes at a higher price. Often customers do not mind paying a little extra to get a better version of the product they are searching. For instance, if a buyer is looking for an essential phone on your website, you can upsell by suggesting a smartphone within a lower range. The suggested product definitely has some added features with a bit higher price tag. It is common to see pizza sellers asking, “Do you want a bigger one?” when you place an order for small or medium sizes.
Cross-sell: When a buyer is on a product page, you may suggest them some complementary items therein or at the cart checkout. For instance, when a buyer purchases a jacket on a website, the seller may display some matching product recommendations such as shoes, trousers, tie, etc. Thus, upselling is a process of showing an advanced version of same product while cross-selling involves selling different items complementing the main product. Doing the things right with upselling and cross-selling practices, you can increase your sales and revenues to greater digits.
5 Best Practices to Succeed with Upsell and Cross-sell
Not using these marketing tactics on your website yet? You are missing the golden chances of making more sales on every purchase. Herein are the tried and tested tricks to maximize you sales with upselling and cross-selling on your WooCommerce store.
Suggest Matching and Complementary Products
While suggesting products for cross-selling always show items relevant to the purchased product. If a customer has purchased BBQ griller on your website, you can recommend a cookbook with grill recipes, BBQ skewers, marination spices, etc. Do not show irrelevant products such as cosmetics, software products, or computer while cross-selling other items. The suggested products should be relevant to the purchased item.
Show Problem-Solving and Helpful Recommendations
When customers find the product helpful, there is an urge to spend more. If someone purchases a gas oven, you may cross-sell gas lighter, gas hose, and regulator.
This is helpful for the customer who will not have to browse through other pages to find these products and at the same time may also consider changing the old hose. If the customer is browsing for two-burner oven, you may also show three or four burner ovens, induction appliances for upselling.
Show the Most Desirable Products
There are three prime factors influencing the purchase decision of the buyers. When you cross-sell and upsell on your WooCommerce site, the buyers look for the following aspects of the item:
- Positive customer reviews
- Relevance
- Bestseller items
- The consumers are eager to spend more when they find a product with better features, sold most number of times, and have maximum positive reviews.
Display “Limited Period Offer” Announcement
When you want to make quick revenue with upsells and cross-sells, make your recommendations seem urgent to the visitors. When it is a limited period offer, or limited stocks, the customers tend to act quickly. For instance, the notification- “only 5 pieces left” on a product-based online store or “I can offer add-on services for the next five clients only” on a website offering services, influences the customers to take quick action. Make sure you highlight the offer so that it is noticeable when a buyer is on the product page.
Make the Purchase Process Effortless
When you recommend products through upsell or cross-sell bundled with an offer, it should be a simple process to claim the offer. You can add powerful extensions or customize the WooCommerce store, to make it user-friendly and ease the process of claiming offers with a few clicks.
Maximizing Sales with Product Recommendations
It can be quite time-consuming to use the built-n WooCommerce product recommendations feature. The functionality allows the storeowners to set up recommendation for each individual product. This is hectic when you have over thousands of product on the store gallery. The best way to get this done is with the right product recommendation plugin. Some basic settings allow the admin to take control of the upsell and cross-sell recommendations on an automated system. When a customer purchases a treadmill on your website, you may upsell by instantly displaying upgraded models and cross-sell by using tags like gym apparels, nutrition supplements or anything relevant based on your store business. It takes a one-time setup. You need to add tags and categories to your existing products. This is easy and fast to execute whenever you add new products on store gallery. Once you create tags and categories for your products, it takes little time to implement your upsell and cross-sell strategies.
Recommend Products Based on the Recent Browsing History
If someone is viewing several pages for pressure cookers, it indicates the customer wants to buy pressure cooker. If the same person is also browsing through different items like cutlery sets, crockery, kitchen tools, the person is interested in kitchen and dining supplies. Recommending products from these categories that the customer has not yet viewed may increase your chances to increase sales while offering something to solve the customer’s problem for a great buying experience. Determine Where and How to Place the Upsell and Cross-sell Offers. Some of the best places to recommend products to your customer are:
- Product pages (upsell and cross-sell)
- Cart checkout page (cross-sell)
- Payment confirmation page (cross-sell)
Offering complementary products within a lower price range at the checkout page or payment page often influences the customers to go for some extra add-ons.
Introduce Upsell and Cross-sell Offers on Bestseller and Trending Products
It is easy to sell products that have received higher-ratings, positive customer reviews, and relevant to the customer’s requirements (based on the search history).
Offer the most valuable relevant product when to succeed with the Product Recommendation marketing plan.
Guide the Buyers to Get a Complete Package
With cross-selling you not only increase sales but can also guide the buyers to find solutions to their problem. A customer who purchases a professional tablet can work effectively if there is a tablet casing with stand and tablet compatible keyboard. You can pair such products based on the purchase analytics. When some items are commonly purchased together, it is easy to do the rest of the chore. Add such complementary products with messages such as “Customers also viewed these items”. “Frequently brought together” is another impressive message to impact your buyers.
Set Up Automated Personalized Reminders
With Product Recommendation, you can also track the products pages visited by a certain customer during each session. You may also show a notification on the cart page with a message “Do you want to leave these?” showing the items viewed but not added to the cart for purchasing. This is a nice approach to remind the buyers something, which they might have missed out for some reason. Customers feel comfortable receiving such notifications that ease the buying process.
Set Up a Reconsideration Reminder at the Order Confirmation Page
Repeat the above strategy again on the order confirmation page with a message like “Are you still looking for these” showing the products not yet added to the cart checkout.
After setting the Product Recommendations in this way, the things will run automatically for every buyer for each purchase. Your effort on one-time setup can influence at least a small section of buyers to return to the site for more shopping. There may be reluctance to return and spend more time for many customers. You can encourage them with a one-time discount coupon with a message “buy any of these products and save 10%”. A limited period coupon offer is too irresistible to reject.
Introduce a Free Shipping Threshold
Everyone loves free shipping. You can encourage the buyers to shop more with a simple free shipping message “Get free shipping on $45.99”. The condition to reach the minimum spending amount to get the free shipping works for most of the buyers. Customers spend more to avoid the shipping fees and you make more sales with this trick.
Motivate Buyers with Urgent Deals
As discussed earlier, limited period offers often influence the buyers to act quickly. This is one of the most effective ways to encourage the buyers with upselling and cross-selling. To do this, you can add “Limited Period Offer” deals to the Product Recommendation extension settings. You can add items with lesser shelf time left, perishable goods, and clearance stocks to such offers for effective results especially during holidays or any other time of the year.
Keep an Eye on the Analytics
The Product Recommendations extension comes with powerful analytics facilitating the sellers to view various metrics, count on the product views, conversions, sales performances, and so much more. Use this data to calculate your financial gains, customer behavior on the site, products receiving maximum views, best-selling items, etc. Best part is, you can use this information to implement sales strategies and restructure your upsells and cross-sells recommendations in the coming time.
Upsell and Cross-sell Takeaways
The key to success with cross-selling and upsells depends on how you implement these strategies. The right thing at the right point plays the game changer.
With the right Product Recommendation extension, you can do all these easily, save time and money, get a lot of takers, and raise your sales revenues.