Shopify Upsell Vs Cross-Sell
If you want to sell more products per order, you basically have two choices: to upsell or cross-sell customers. We built Ultimate Upsell to allow you to do both on your Shopify store.
In this great blog post, they say that a research from Forrester reveals that upsells and cross-sells are responsible for more than 30% of e-commerce revenue.
In the same blog post, I also stumbled upon this graph:
You can see that upselling drives more than 4% of online sales, while cross-sells earn 0.2%. I suggest you make your own tests, though, before coming to conclusions.
According to GetElastic, here are the conversion rates of upsells/cross-sells in the Shopping Cart VS the conversion on the Product Page.
Conversion rates in the Shopping Cart
- ✓ 1/4 stores has 4% or less conversion
- ✓ 1/10 stores has between 5-10% conversion
- ✓ 3/100 store has a conversion higher than 10%
- ✓ More than 6/10 stores don't know the conversion rates or don’t merchandise in the shopping cart.
Conversion rates on Product Pages
- ✓ 1/5 store has 4% or less conversion
- ✓ 1/10 store has between 3-7% conversion
- ✓ 1/20 store had higher than 7% conversion
- ✓ Close to 1/3 store doesn't know the conversion rates or doesn't upsell/cross-sell on the product pages.
That maybe points to a bigger problem: stores don't know their conversion rates. Or when they do, they calculate it poorly. We solved that in Ultimate Upsell with a simple dashboard that tracks 3 main metrics:
- # views
- # adds to cart
- # purchases
Upsell on Shopify
Have you ever purchased from Apple or Godaddy ? There is a few chances you ended up buying what you added to cart at first or only that.
Upselling is when you convince customers to buy something extra or more expensive. For example, the Big Mac at McDonald's is kind of the upsell of the cheeseburger.
The more familiar the upsell is, the bigger the chance of making a sale. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and ask yourself: "In this context, on this page or with this product already in the shopping cart, what else the customers would need?"
In another post, we give a great upsell of How to Upsell a bigger, better product on Shopify.
Cross-sell on Shopify
This article from Crazy Eggs summarizes perfectly what the cross-sell is:
A cross-sell is when you sell a different product or service to a customer. When a restaurant waiter asks you if you’d like a Coke with your fries, or fries with your burger, that’s a cross-sell. Cross-sells work well with lower-priced items. When buying an iPad, you might be tempted to buy a case, too. But it may not work the other way around.
Cross-sells also work well with items that require accessories. For instance, if you just purchased a computer, you might be interested in a printer or touch-screen monitor.
Just remember, when choosing upsell and cross-sell products, don’t pick items that increase the total order cost by more than 25%. The increased cost may make the customer abandon the order altogether.
Here's a post we wrote to illustrate a great example of cross-sell on a Shopify store.
Upsell + Cross-sell
When you think about it, the master chef of upselling & cross-selling might not be Apple, Godaddy or Amazon, but McDonald's.
- They upsell you a Big Mac over a cheeseburger
- They cross-sell you fries and coke
- They upsell the cross-sell with bigger fries and a bigger coke
- They bundle it in a trio
The list could go on and on...
While the definition of the words might be confusing, keep in mind what you want is to sell more product per order. So no matter if you upsell, cross-sell, bundle, etc... the goal stays the same: sell more products per order, and indirectly sell more per visit.
To do so, you need to provide more value to customers. Because they won't buy just because you offer more products. They will buy because you offer more value. And good deals.