Best Practices for Ecommerce Cross Sells and Upsells.

Video Transcript

If you are not currently using cross sells or up sells and you have an ecommerce store, you definitely need to be. This is a way to – if done correctly – almost immediately increase your overall gross sales by as much as 10, 20 percent or even more.

I often get asked, “Well where should you do this? Where’s the best place to try to do a cross sell or an up sell?” 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 sells 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 the flexibility within your shopping cart to do that in a way that allows some trying out of different methods.

As far as the best place to do it, 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. The places where we’ve seen it to be most potent is definitely on the product pages because 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 cross sell or up sell in the shopping cart or on the product page may be relatively easy or may be fairly complex, depending on how your shopping cart is set up. So that’s something that has to be investigated with your ecommerce provider or with your ecommerce developer. 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 would be a classic example of this. “People who looked at this also looked at this” or “People who bought this also bought this.” If you have enough sales volume on your website and also the capability within your ecommerce solution, as that 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 carts will allow you to do the user generated cross sell, up sell; and also do a hand picked cross sell, up sell – which can also be really good – because you as the business owner or product manager have a really in-depth understanding of product, which probably goes well beyond what your typical customer has. So there’s also suggestions that you’ll want to test out or that you know 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 – as we spoke about earlier – be able to test those at various points throughout the process, both in the content management and the shopping cart.

A really great program for testing these out is Google Website Optimizer. It can be configured to test these out. That happens to be a free program if you’re not already familiar with that. And there’s also several other analytics testing-type software programs that can be used. Depending on the set-up of your shopping cart, typically there is one that will work quite well. Again you want to do this; you want to test; you want to try things. There isn’t a set way.

The bottom line is you want 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 those relate to things; and ideally have both those in play; and then test. And in your testing, ideally use something like Google Website Optimizer so that you get real test data and you only make decisions based on mathematical significance. So you have some software that’s helping to see -“Yes you show this item with this cross sell this many times; and the preference was this item.” It’s all in the math and you’re not making decisions just based on your gut.