How are you recommending related products on your shopping cart that both offer a helpful service and increase revenue at the same time?
If your retail website sells dozens of products, you’re likely using a shopping cart instead of a solo order flow. One of the biggest advantages to using a shopping cart is the ability to easily upsell a customer to related products. If you have a large product inventory, then you’re able to turn on all kinds of upsell recommendation engines in your shopping cart to help users find related products and increase your revenue at check out.
However, you need to be careful when you do this not to interrupt or irritate your users. When you recommend other products, your upsell technique should be helpful to the user, not distracting.
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For this article, we’re going to use the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on Amazon.com because the book is offered on multiple platforms and because the shopping cart is a best-practice example.
Here are four of the best shopping cart upsell strategies:
Best Shopping Cart Upsell #1: Bundling Upsell – If you have a complimentary product, let the user know on the product page. In this upsell, you are suggesting that the user buy two or more products together for one low price (the price can offer a discount or not). This works well when you have multiple products on the same topic or one product on multiple platforms, such as a book in both paperback and audio form.
Here is a good example of bundling on Amazon.com:
Your upsell strategy when bundling products is only effective if you are offering your users a service. The best way to do this is to carefully select your related products so that they make sense when put together.
Best Shopping Cart Upsell #2: Multiplatform Upsell – Another form of bundling is to show the different platforms your product is offered on all in one place. Amazon has started to do this fairly effectively on their website:
This upsell is effective because it allows the user to buy more than one version of the same product. For example, maybe they prefer an audio CD of the book, but they want to buy the bok for someone else. From this page, they can decide to buy both. In other instances, the user would have to search for both products separately, making the buying both platforms less convenient.
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Best Shopping Cart Upsell#3: Cross-Selling Upsell – This method is used to increase trust and generate sales based on the buying trends of other shoppers.
In this instance, you give the user a list of related products that other people have bought in addition to the current product. This not only establishes your credibility as a seller by showing the popularity of your products, but it also gives more visibility to the rest of your product line.
This “Customers Who Bought Items in Your Shopping Cart Also Bought” suggestion is found on the product page, on the page once you’ve added the product to your shopping cart, and on the shopping cart page itself.
Amazon also offers three more suggestion tools once you’ve put the product in your shopping cart, “Customers Who Shopped for XXXXX Also Shopped For” and “Customers Who Bought Items in Your Shopping Cart Also Bought”.
Best Shopping Cart Upsell #4: Feedback Upsell – This last type of upsell tells the user how popular a product is, by providing the percentage of people who bought the product and by showing a feedback rating on this product.
This upsell is useful because it usually establishes the current product as the most popular product, but it’s also another way to offer your user more related products in another helpful form.
If you liked this article, you might enjoy our 10 Steps to Better Shopping Cart Usability article too.
