Get Started on Up-sell and Cross-sell Techniques for your Magento Website
When considering how to improve the business performance of your store, it’s important to check your foundation. Make sure the product catalog is well organized and takes advantage of Magento’s most valuable native features. Before a cross-sell or an up-sell can happen, your store’s shopping experience needs to be intuitive, clear, and informative. Fast doesn’t hurt, either! Instead of diving into the Magento admin for up-sell and cross-sell features, start by optimizing product descriptions, product attributes and product types.
Product descriptions should be clear and original. Don’t spare relevant detail because you’ve been told descriptions should be short. But also don’t add subjective selling language. Cross selling won’t happen if the shopper doesn’t gain a sense of credibility from the information you present.
Don’t ignore attributes. Magento plays well with attributes – so be generous with them! Make sure your items carry all the attributes that you’ll need for cross-promoting and associating them in the “related products” space or with other products in widget-controlled promotional blocks. New attributes are easy to make and assign individually or as a set.
Learn about the Magento product types. Learn how and when to use a bundled product, vs a configurable product. If you are asking developers to do things to Magento so that you can set up simple products the way you want, first make sure you have exhausted the software’s built-in capabilities.
Master Magento’s Built In Up-sell and Cross-sell Merchandising Tools
Sometimes, you just want to stand out and be different. This business impulse makes sense when we’re talking about branding, product quality, service, and packaging. Other times, it pays to meet the shopper’s expectations and habits by simply employing eCommerce best practices. Notably, Magento has several helpful merchandising tools built into its platform.
The best place to get started is right here in Magento’s admin:
From any product page, scroll down to and expand the “Related Products, Up-Sells and Cross-Sells” section in the Magento Admin. The simplest vehicle for helping your customers fill their cart in Magento is the “Related Products” functionality. See below:
Merchants can also use the “Up-Sell Products” feature to display other catalog items. See below:
The “Up-Sell Products” feature is easily selectable via the admin and requires no customization. If information on the product pages and overall User Interface (UI) has built trust with customers, they might be feeling confident enough to crack open their wallet a bit wider for a more expensive alternative. The “Up-Sell Products” feature is an excellent opportunity for an up-sell, and the temptation also conveniently happens on the product detail page.
The third element listed in the Magento Admin is “Cross-sell products”, which will display in the Magento cart. The “Cross-sell products” feature can be an especially effective tactic to create an impulse purchase. The customer has already added at least one item to the cart – why not just one more?
All three of these Magento-native merchandising tools can be implemented individually, or via user-defined rules and conditions including: display; start date; duration; quantity; price differentials; and other aspects of the promotion.
Accelerate Beyond Magento’s Native Features
Inevitably, as businesses takes off, merchants want to extend Magento via extensions. Hundreds of choices are available for advanced up-sell and cross-sell techniques such as photo tools, video plugins, couponing, custom widgets, loyalty programs, etc. Some require installation of an extension, others run remotely as a subscription. As developers, marketers, and observers of our clients’ businesses, we always counsel to make these choices strategically to save time and money.
We recommend optimizing what’s already available in Magento to start. Once product descriptions, attributes and product types are in place, we help clients focus on Magento’s native up-sell and cross-sell features. Once those are used to their greatest effect, we will recommend and install some of the great merchandising and sales-building extensions available for Magento.
Contact us to learn more about Magento’s Up-sell and Cross-sell features. Or, give us a call to talk to a Magento expert: 513-469-3345.