Up-sell and Cross-sell strategies – Tips to improve your eCommerce revenue

Numerous sales tactics are developed by companies to improve their revenue stream significantly. Among these, two strategies that are increasingly being used by many companies with great results are the upselling and cross-selling method.

Before we dive into this topic to know about the advantages that these two strategies can provide to your eCommerce business, we need to first know what is up-selling and cross-selling.

What is up-selling?

Up-selling is a strategy in which you persuade your customers to purchase a more costly version of the product in which you are interested in. One example of this strategy is that if a customer comes looking for a 21 inch TV, you can suggest him to buy a 32 inch TV instead.

And when you show him the product, then chances are that the customer may opt for it as it will allow him to see the pictures on a bigger screen.

What is Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling is a bit different than the up-selling because, in this type of strategy, you will suggest to your customer another product which is complementary to the one which he/she is originally interested in buying. One example of cross-selling is to suggest taking a DTH connection with the new TV they have purchased to look at the programs with greater clarity.

Examples

You will have used Amazon application lots of time but have you ever observed that they are using up sell and cross sell techniques ? If not, then go to any product page, you will see complementary products (cross sell) as well as you might also like products (up sell). If you also want to create an app like amazon

and wants to try these techniques then study them very well before you use it in your app. When you use these two strategies in tandem, then you can boost your online sale tremendously.

Now the question arises, how you can use these two strategies optimally to improve the revenue stream of your e-commerce company. Here, we will like to give you some tips that you can use to improve the balance sheet of your company.

1) Use plug-in: If you are a small business that is selling only a few products online, then there is no problem and you can strategize how to up-sell and cross-sell your inventory to maximize your profit. However, if you are selling a large number of products online, then using these two strategies individually for every product may become a big problem.

To solve it, you can use plug-ins that will allow customers a more personalized shopping experience at the same time help you to up-sell and cross-sell individual items of your inventories.

2) Put the interest of the buyer’s first: Up selling and cross selling is a very
genuine sales strategy wherein you can put the interest of the customer at the centre to ensure that they get the best possible deal for the money they’re spending in your e-commerce company.

After you have identified their buying pattern and what they are looking for, you can offer them a better product at a more competitive price along with a complimentary service that will help them to enjoy that product in greater detail.

3) Don’t provide too many options to confuse them: While up selling and cross selling is a great incentive to the customers to help buy more, if you overdo it then it can have a negative impact on your overall sales strategy.

Offering too many options to their buyers may confuse them and they will find it difficult to select a product that will give them optimum satisfaction. Therefore, try to keep the choices low and focus more on quality than quantity.

4) Offer your customers more information: Your customers will only pay more for a premium product if they know what new features they will get that is different from the one they have tried to select earlier.

Therefore, whenever you are up-selling or cross-selling a product, you should provide detailed information about the extra benefits the customers will get when they buy that product from your online website.

5) Collect quality data relating to the customer’s buying pattern: Nowadays, if you want a strategy to perform as planned, you need a huge amount of data. To make up-selling and cross-selling strategies a grand success, you need to base them on data analytics.

This will give you an idea what the customers are looking for, what are their desire (by looking at what kind of products they are browsing for) and how to use premium products in your inventory to satisfy those desires.

6) Keeping a step ahead of your customer’s need: One great thing about analytics is that it allows you to predict what kind of products your customers will like to buy in the future (by analyzing their buying habit over a period of time).

This will have a great impact on your ability to predict their future buying patterns. When you know that, then you can utilize up-selling and cross selling strategies more effectively to sell premium products to your customers.

Advantages of cross selling and up selling

1) It allows you to provide more choices to your customers, which enhances their long-term association with your easy retail store.

2) It improves customer’s equity and broadens offer them greater convenience and flexibility while buying products.

3) It improves the ROI of the company significantly.

4) It also promotes innovation and helps in improving customer satisfaction.

These are some of the advantages that you can offer to your customers by adopting the up-selling and cross-selling strategies in your website or eCommerce app development process, at the same time improving the profit margin of your company.

Therefore, do a proper analysis on how to effectively use these two strategies in tandem and what products in your portfolio you should target with up-selling and cross-selling strategies.