Have your sales stalled? You’ve employed several methods to boost sales. However, you can’t see any noticeable difference in the sales column.
This calls for a tactic that is quite effective when it comes to boosting your online store income. When looking through other online stores, you’ve probably noticed phrases such as “Frequently Bought Together.” Sometimes, it’s stated differently. It can be “People also viewed” or “You might also like.” This is what is known as cross-selling.
Cross-selling to boost eCommerce sales works by suggesting products that complement those that the potential buyer is already interested in. You can present these options to the buyer when they’re on the checkout page. This way, they’re likely to add complementary products to their cart.
On the other hand, you can present related products on the product pages of the different items.
Take this example, your online shop sells male care products. If a customer adds beard trimmers and a brush to their cart, you might suggest beard oil. They want to take care of their beard and keep them neat. Therefore, it makes sense that they might be interested in beard oil as well. This is just one example of effective cross-selling for eCommerce.
In this article, we’re going to reveal other such ways to use cross-selling for more eCommerce sales. Let’s get to it. For effective cross-selling, you need to display your products distinctively and appealingly. This is sure to increase conversions.
What Are The Benefits Of Cross-Selling?
As the title of this article so clearly states, you’re using cross-selling to boost your brand’s eCommerce sales. And this is the main reason several online brands use this tactic. However, cross-selling brings other benefits to your online store. These include:
- Fewer operation costs: When dealing with single product orders, you spend a bit of money processing and managing each order.
However, cross-selling allows you to handle several products in one order. This cuts down your operating costs. You’re also spending less on optimizing your site to showcase every single product. Cross-selling allows you to handle optimization for several products at once.
- Increase sales of underperforming products: Cross-selling presents an opportunity to increase sales of products that your buyers rarely see.
By showing them alongside your best-sellers, you increase the chances that potential buyers see their value.
- Better online shopping experience: With this tactic, a customer doesn’t have to browse your entire site to find several products that they want.
The other products they want are most probably the ones you suggested. This convenience makes their shopping experience better. And this is a great bridge to our final cross-selling benefit.
- Customer loyalty and retention: Customer loyalty is the result of a customer's likeliness to do repeat business with a company or brand. If customers have a pleasant shopping experience at your online store, they’re more than likely to come back.
Additionally, they become unwitting brand ambassadors. The result is that you have more visitors and more sales.
How To Use Cross-Selling To Increase Sales
Before we can get into the different strategies, we need to stress that cross-selling and upselling are different. As we’ve already stated, cross-selling involves suggesting complementary or related products to the customer.
However, with upselling, you’re trying to convince the customers to buy a related but more expensive product. Clear? We’ll take that as a yes. Now for the effective strategies to guide your cross-selling efforts.
Use Your Best-Selling Products As A Starting Point
Your best-selling products are already popular. That’s why they’re flying off your virtual shelves and even virtual fitting rooms. Why not take advantage of the massive amount of traffic those particular product pages are drawing in? What goes well with your popular product? Find these products and present them as suggestions to your customers. Since the main product is already popular, buyers are more likely to add it to their carts.
This is because to realize the full potential of the main item. Simply put, “I really want this item. Why not add this as well? Couldn’t hurt to use them together.” Take our previous example of male care products. Your store has made a name for having high-quality beard trimmers.
When customers view the trimmers, suggest the beard oil as well. This is what’s going through the mind of the customer. “I already want to trim my beard to make it look neat. Why not add this beard oil to give it that extra sheen?” And just like that, you’ve increased the value of that one order.
As the beard oil gets more popular, you can suggest a beard shampoo for the customer to use before applying the oil. See where we’re going with this? Effective cross-selling for eCommerce builds interest and demand for items across your entire range of products.
Tap Into The Customers’ Activity Patterns On Your Site
Customers are more likely to buy when you show them what they want. And one way of knowing what they want is by tracking their activity in your store. When setting up your site, you should include Google Analytics in your online store. This helps you know what visitors do when they land on your website.
The insights you get from analyzing this data let you know what products your potential customers view a lot. So, suppose a customer adds a particular product to their cart. In that case, you can show them what related products other people viewed the most.
This is a form of social proof. If other people viewed that item, the customer felt compelled to buy that item as well. Other third-party tracking apps also provide an insightful overview of your site visitors’ activity. Using this information alongside Google Analytics provides a more complete picture.
You can now know which products clients are more likely to buy together. The free Debutify theme bundles premium add-ons onto your Shopify store, enabling you to keep tabs on your site’s customer activity.
Invest In High-Definition Photography
After all, you’re trying to convince customers to buy more than they intended to when they came onto your site. They need to see what exactly it is you’re trying to make them buy. Therefore, professional photography is a worthwhile investment. High-definition product photography shows all the different angles of the product. Additionally, you can use this high-quality photography to show the complementary items in use.
For instance, you run an online fashion store, selling men’s attire. One of the products you’re showcasing is the latest floral shirt. You can use this opportunity to use cross-selling for more eCommerce sales. When a potential buyer lands on the floral shirt’s product page, you can prompt them to complete the look.
You can suggest related items like casual chino shorts, loafers, and sunglasses. How do you sell this idea of buying all this when they just came for the shirt? Include a quality photograph of a model wearing the entire ensemble.
When the customer sees that they go well together as a look, they’re more likely to add one or more of the suggested products.
Show The Value / Benefit Of The Complementary Product
You can use cross-selling for more eCommerce sales by showing the value of the additional product. Display the stand-out features and advantages of the related product.
When the customer reads through these, they are more convinced to buy that item as well. Listing the beneficial features isn’t the only way to show value. Earlier, we briefly mentioned social proof.
This is when people are convinced to do something because other people have done so. Over 95 percent of customers read reviews before buying a product.
These are strangers they don’t know. But they’ll trust the stranger’s word to determine if your product is worth it. Use this to your advantage. Add reviews for every complementary or related product you display alongside the customer’s preferred product. With Debutify’s nifty look, you can easily add reviews to each product.
The free Shopify theme also ensures that the reviews are where the customer can easily see them. However, they don’t overshadow the product.
Where To From Here?
Now that you’ve grasped the concept of effective cross-selling for eCommerce, you can apply it to your online store. Use your best-selling products as your starting point.
From there, use your customer activity to present them with exactly what they want. Show it off in high-definition. And to drive the point home, show the value of the additional product you’re trying to sell.
Cross-selling to boost eCommerce sales is more effective if your online store is optimized to show off your products. Debutify is optimized to take advantage of high-quality aesthetics for both your desktop and mobile sites.
Trisha Ballesteros