Upselling and cross-selling are two sales techniques that every store owner can use to earn more profits. Therefore, this article will be providing you with 6 shopify upsell crosssell tactics that increase your Shopify revenue. Let’s delve deeper to get:
- What are upsell and cross-sell
- Why do these strategies play an important role in growing Shopify’s revenue
- 5+ best practices to implement upsell and cross-sell on Shopify successfully
- Other effective marketing strategies
Table of Contents
Shopify eCommerce features
Shopify is inherently renowned for state-of-the-art features that help you build and manage an online business effortlessly.
Different from open-source carts like WooCommerce, Magento, or OpenCart, Shopify comes with a drag-and-drop interface without diminishing user-friendliness. In addition, Shopify attaches a full security patch within every subscription plan. Hence, there’s no need to worry about information leaking issues. These are common features of hosted carts like BigCommerce, Wix, or Squarespace.
More importantly, it’s a fertile ground for big sellers and enterprises to scale up their businesses with Shopify Plus. You can also take a look at a comparison of Shopify vs. Shopify Plus here for more details.
An overview of Shopify
No matter whether you’re already a Shopify store owner or a user-to-be, understanding its eCommerce features would benefit you in many ways.
First, you’ll avail of wide-ranging reports about revenue, customer behaviors, conversion rates, and more. This helps you a lot in defining business goals as well as targeting the right customers for better engagement.
Second, it’s quite easy to add and manage products and related information on Shopify. Plus, Shopify’s quantity tracking features will powerfully help you notice SKUs and out-of-stock items.
Last but not least, Shopify enriches itself with a sheer number of payment processors like Stripe, Paypal, Authorize, and 2Checkout,… Also, this superior platform develops a separate payment system called Shopify Payments that eliminates the additional fee on each transaction your store carries out.
Upsell vs. Cross-sell: What are the differences?
Upselling and cross-selling are no longer unfamiliar terms when it comes to online business. Both of them are effective customer retention strategies that enhance Shopify’s revenue by offering more products. Before discovering the best upsell and cross-sell practices, let’s take a look at a quick comparison between upselling and cross-selling.
What is upselling vs. cross-selling?
Upselling is a common sales technique that encourages customers to buy more products before making payments. That could be a more feature-rich version of a camera, a bigger size of a flower vase, or a more upgraded version of a digital item,…To be more specific, store owners will suggest value-added products to those who already complete the order confirmation on their store rather than brand-new customers.
In the most general sense, upselling and cross-selling are two effective strategies that e-merchants use to increase their store revenue. Hence, there is usually a misconception that upselling and cross-selling can be used interchangeably. However, cross-selling refers to suggesting items related to what they have already added to their shopping cart.
To make it simple, let’s take a look at our example of cross-selling here. Suppose you are browsing through an electronics store for a laptop. Based on the product you want to buy, this store also recommends you buy a mouse, earphones, a detachable keyboard, and the like.
Briefly, upselling means adding value to the same product that your customers already bought. Meanwhile, cross-selling focuses on suggesting complimentary items to the products in which your clients are interested.
So, why upselling and cross-selling are among the most popular customer retention strategies that increase sales (and Shopify revenue, of course)? Let’s keep reading!
Why upselling and cross-selling worth heeding?
We all know that both upselling and cross-selling could bring profitable results to the table, but how exactly? So here are a few benefits you can get by implementing these sales tactics:
1. Maximize profits
As a matter of fact, customers will be more likely to spend money on value-added products and complimentary items that they think they’ll take full advantage of. Hence, upselling and cross-selling extend their shopping cart, increasing your store’s average order value. In other words, these sales techniques significantly generate profits for your business to continue growing.
2. Increase customer engagement
Besides product quality, customers nowadays pay greater attention to their shopping experience. It even gets harder when it comes to online selling, as you need to understand what customers are looking for without direct interaction. Thus, the suggestion of relevant products gives buyers an impression that they are all you care about, resulting in better customer engagement.
3. Build strong customer relationships
In the most general sense, upselling and cross-selling refer to offering what customers need or want. So if your product recommendation can solve your customer’s problems, they’ll feel a strong connection with your brand and be willing to return for more benefits, leading to long-term customer relationships.
6 effective upselling & cross-selling strategies for Shopify revenue growth
Among all the factors discussed above, we hope that you have a better overview of upselling and cross-selling. In this section, we will be providing you with 6 practices to implement these tactics successfully for the growth of your Shopify revenue. Let’s check it!
1. Understand your buyer personas
A buyer persona is a term commonly used to indicate the profile of your target customers. Based on the results of market research and other data analysis, you can clearly identify related information about your future customers. It could be age, gender, nationality, location, taste and preferences. In other words, possessing your buyer personas means understanding your customer insight.
(Image source: Unsplash)
So why does buyer personas analysis help you offer better upsell and cross-sell strategies? Well, the reason lies in the fact that you know exactly what values should be added to your products or what complimentary items your customers would definitely be interested in and provide proper recommendations.
2. Leverage customer-generated content
Defining buyer personas is an important step in leveraging your business with Shopify. However, it’s not enough. Besides that, you need to take notice of the buyer’s journey, a three-stage framework that helps convert website visitors into customers. You can take a look at our ultimate guide to building a sales funnel for more details.
The buyer’s journey (Image source)
At each stage, your target customers will have different mindsets and problems, which require different solutions and incentives. Hence, you need to provide informative content proving that your value-added products are worth buying. By doing this, your upsell and cross-sell strategies are persuasive enough to attract more potential customers.
(Image source: Unsplash)
3. Keep track of customer behaviors reports
As mentioned in the section above, Shopify comes with an insightful data reporting tool that helps you evaluate your business performance easily.
One important indicator you should consider while implementing upsell and cross-sell strategies is customer behavior. These reports will help you comprehensively overview your customer profile, including demographics, interests, most frequently used devices, and more.
More importantly, these figures play an essential role in evaluating the effectiveness of upselling and cross-selling tactics. This helps you understand which products should be displayed on the Checkout page and which ones can’t contribute to your Shopify revenue.
It will be a pity if you miss using social media to promote your products as well as marketing strategies like upselling and cross-selling.
(Image source: Unsplash)
Rather than a means of communication merely, social media is more likely to become an efficient selling channel. Thanks to thousands of users all around the world, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and similar social channels turn out to be a promising landscape for e-merchants in general and Shopify users in particular.
Hence, we suggest that you can prepare a content calendar. It will notify your followers that you are offering upgraded products and complimentary items as well.
5. Use Shopify upsell and cross-sell apps
It’s common knowledge that Shopify comes with a plethora of apps and extensions that boost the productiveness of your online store. When it comes to upselling and cross-selling, Shopify also provides various add-ons for your consideration.
In this part, we love to recommend some top-rated upsell and cross-sell apps that would increase your Shopify revenue:
- CartHook Post Purchase Offers: Creates real post-purchase offers between the Checkout and Thank You page so that customers can add extra products without re-entering the order confirmation information.
- Ultimate Special Offers: This app allows you to manage all sales and discounts in one place. Plus, you can choose from 9 different types of promotions such as upsells, free gifts, discounts, bundles,…
- Unlimited Smart Upsell Offers: Provides customers with unlimited offer views to optimize your store’s average order value. Besides, this app helps you promote holiday sales by featuring sales items.
- Candy Rack: Automates discounted upsells and cross-sells thanks to the power of Shopify’s AI technology.
6. Omnichannel selling
Besides upselling and cross-selling, omnichannel selling is also a decent marketing strategy to increase your Shopify revenue. In an Omnichannel selling model, your customers will benefit from a seamless experience on multiple channels such as marketplaces, social media channels, brick-and-mortar stores, as well as multiple devices like desktops or mobile phones.
Spectacularly, the Omnichannel strategy ensures brand consistency on all selling channels and devices. This means your store has a higher chance to stand out from other competitors thanks to brand awareness and authority. Therefore, creating an Omnichannel model is also beneficial for your brand expansion.
More importantly, opening an online kiosk on eCommerce marketplaces like Etsy, eBay or Amazon would enhance your product visibility in front of more online shoppers. Hence, we highly recommend that you integrate your Shopify store with high-traffic marketplaces to fully use online selling. Currently, LitCommerce comes as a rescue that helps you synchronize your Shopify store with 6+ largest marketplaces effortlessly. In addition, you can upload product listings and manage orders right on LitCommerce, which saves you a lot of time.
Final words
Upselling and cross-selling are three of the numerous marketing strategies that you can implement to increase your Shopify revenue. We hope that this article somewhat helps you understand how these sales techniques work and successfully apply them to your business.
