Written by Raúl Carrión
The upselling applied to online stores consists of the execution of techniques that favor the user to end up buying products of a higher amount than he had initially considered. Not to be confused with cross-selling, another strategy consisting of cross-selling complementary products.
In the online shopping process there are two key places where up-selling can take place: the product page and the shopping cart. In both places the system will try to offer the user a similar product and of a higher range so that the amount of the order will increase.
Tips for upselling
Offering only products that bring real improvement
The up-selling system replaces the work of a salesperson in a physical store. You should therefore act consistently and only offer products that really bring a substantial improvement.
Highlighting the added value
If we offer a more expensive product without highlighting how it is better and why it is worth making this last-minute economic effort, the customer may perceive that the online store is too aggressive and lose credibility with the customer.
Propose feasible improvements
The proposed products must be the immediate superior products. The greater the economic difference, the less likely this strategy will be successful. In addition, once the user is visiting the next higher product, you can apply the same technique again to recommend a higher product.
How to do upselling in your online store?
If your online store is developed on an open source CMS such as Prestashop or Magento it is possible to find modules that automatically apply this technique. If it is a custom development you can also hire the development of this functionality by determining yourself the policy to be applied.
It is most common to offer the next higher-priced product in the same product family.
As can be deduced, the fact that the system proposes products automatically simplifies the work and makes it possible to apply up-selling to the entire product catalog, however extensive it may be. An alternative with which you will achieve better results, despite investing more time, is that the system allows you to manually select the products to be recommended. And the ideal option is the result of combining the two previous ones: if up-selling products have been manually selected for a product, they will be displayed, otherwise the system will make a proposal based on price and product category criteria.
Upselling with product groupings
Whatever your product is, you can always use the upselling technique. If there is no superior product, you should know that there is a variant of upselling that consists of proposing a product pack containing the product desired by the customer. Imagine that your user is interested in a camera, in the product sheet you can recommend the purchase of a set that includes an additional lens and a carrying bag along with the camera. If this set has a discount, the probability of success increases.
Upselling can increase the average order value in your online store if we apply it correctly. Take the test.
