Increasing Sales through Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
Web Commerce Today, Issue 31, February 15, 2000
I operate on this premise: the more products you have for sale, the more likely your shopper is to find what she is looking for. This is why niche stores can be so successful, since they give deep coverage to a narrow niche. Business-to-business sites can also benefit from the techniques I am describing.
All the Eye Can See
In a print catalog, similar products are usually placed in relation to each other on the same page. You can see Good - Better - Best together and compare the features. However, in an online catalog, screen size, screen resolution (72 pixels per inch vs. 300 dpi for print), and bandwidth considerations (download time for multiple photos) mean that you can't duplicate a print layout. The typical page must focus on a single product, and perhaps the various colors, fabrics, or sizes it comes in.
Online merchandisers can use three strategies to stimulate sales and increase the final price tag: (1) offer alternates, (2) offer accessories, and (3) point out the virtues of a more expensive product. Less capable shopping cart programs don't include a great deal of flexibility, but the better systems allow you to link products to each other in several ways, so they will show up as links or thumbnails when one of the related products is displayed. Here's where systems built on programmable databases shine over their inexpensive out-of-the-box cousins. Of course, programmable databases require much more technical expertise than simple merchant storefronts, but they make possible offering multiple products to the customer that she has a good chance of being interested in.
Alternatives
One approach is to offer alternative products. Amazon.com Books does this in several ways. With the current best-selling book Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen, for example, are lists of:
- Customers who bought this book also bought...
- Customers who bought titles by Jakob Nielsen also bought titles by these authors...
- Look for similar books by subject: Computers & Internet titles...
They offer three kinds of alternative products for you to select from. They hope that you will either (1) purchase at least something from all these choices, or perhaps (2) purchase two or three of these books. Either way, more is better. Amazon does this automatically by programming a powerful database. But the essential task is using a relational database to link each product to several other products that are similar. When any one is selected for viewing, the others show up as alternates. This can be done manually, or by assigning narrow categories of products, or in other ways.
Land's End achieves this by placing small thumbnails at the right side of the page whenever a main product has been selected.
eToys has a links under the title "Also See..." Once you've identified a shopper's interest by having him view a product, you can also offer similar products and increase your chance of a sale.
How to Do this with ShopSite
One popular lower-end store system is Open Market ShopSite (http://www.openmarket.com/shopsite/). The 4.x version claims to offer "cross sell" but it really only works well for selling accessories that don't need much explanation or illustration, since all you see is a product name, and an order button, not a link to another product description and photo. If you want to set up a true "cross sell" with ShopSite you can do it this way:
- Use their database upload feature to upload products and pages. Adjustments can be made manually through the web interface, but it is much slower.
- Set up the store to offer a single main product per page.
- Assign the product (and any "cross sell" or subproducts) and arrange it to display first on the page.
- Assign "pages" and arrange them to display below the product. This will consist of thumbnail graphics and short link descriptions of similar cross sell or up-sell products.
In this way you can achieve a cross-sell and up-sell environment in a lower-end system.
Accessories
Accessories are a natural to sell along with products. If you're selling a hunting bow, then offer a package of hunting arrows on the same page. If you're selling computer printers, then offer ink or toner cartridges on the same page. Offering accessories will seldom make the difference between a sale or no sale, but they do tend to increase the transaction total.
Better quality product
When you shop in a brick-and-mortar store, a good salesman will first show you the product you ask for and then explain why a more expensive product is actually a better buy or offers higher quality. It's quite possible to do this in an online store. Provide a brief amount of text with the thumbnail photo of your up-sell products, that says something like. "For an even better quality humidor, look at our ...." Or "Our very finest first-baseman's mitt is made with the ultimate...." Or "For the fastest copy speed and highest quality reproduction, see our ...." Use comparative words in your brief linking text.
When your product pages are designed with alternate products, accessories, and up-sell items, you're store will be operating at a significantly higher level -- and making you more money.
