Ecommerce merchants know that the return on online advertising is critical to their business success or survival. Merchants also understand that returns on advertising investments may improve drastically when they are able to sell more to each newly acquired customer.
What are the tactics and tools that help make online marketing ROI better?
Two tactics that help in increasing the average order value are Cross-selling and Upselling.
In this article, we will review how to do cross-selling and upselling in stores that are running on the BigCommerce platform.
Cross-Selling with BigCommerce
Cross-sell is a product that complements an existing purchase but is from a different category (or vendor). Cross-selling is mutually beneficial by providing additional value to customers with products that they need anyway and increasing revenue without additional marketing costs.
One of the ways to enable cross-selling is to display complementary products on the product detail page or on the shopping cart page.
You also may apply cross-selling tactics in other marketing channels such as email marketing campaigns.
Related Products Feature
BigCommerce Related Product feature is one of the tools to enable cross-selling.
Below is an example from the Toyota Sports store. The store displays complementary product items from different categories in the related products panel.
Here is another example from Ethel’s Baking Co. store. The store changed the related products section title to “You Might Also Like” that is more appropriate there.
When merchants configure the related products panel they can opt to manually select certain products, or allow them to be set automatically.
By default, the product’s related products will be set automatically by the platform built-in algorithm. The algorithm chooses related products based on similarity in the product name and description. The default automated approach does not work well when the suggested items do not necessarily complement each other.
Instead, store owners may select up to five related products that most customers likely buying together.
How to establish optimal groups of related products?
The first step is to determine which items to select as complementary for your most popular products.
You may base your selection of the related products on the market basket analysis or from the store analytics data.
BigCommerce offers Ecommerce Insight that is a premium analytics option. Store owners may use Ecommerce Insight to generate the Purchased Together report. This report shows the related product most frequently sold for each of your top-selling products. You may apply this information for selecting related products or creating product bundles in email marketing or other types of advertising.
Finally, after you have your cross-sell groups, you need to set up your related items in the BigCommerce control panel.
Here are the steps to set up related products manually:
- Open your store’s Control Panel
- Go to Products › View.
- Locate the product you would like to edit. Use the search box to find products.
- Click the product’s name to edit it. You can also click the Action icon and select Edit.
- Open the Other Details Tab
- Scroll to the Related Products section.
- Uncheck the Find and show related products automatically option.
- Now you can locate the category of your first related product.
- You may need to click the + button to expand the categories if the product is assigned to a subcategory.
- After selecting a category, all products belonging to that category will appear in the Add Related Products field. Click to select the related product and add it to the list. If you change your mind, click the – button to remove it.
- Save your changes.
- Open the product for preview. You should be able to see the selected related products in the related product panel.
Customers Also Viewed Feature
Another BigCommerce feature that also facilitates cross-selling is ‘Customers Also Viewed’ panel.
This panel shows products that were viewed by customers who also viewed the current product. It sometimes won’t populate for newer stores, because it needs products to reach a certain view count in conjunction with one another before it has enough data. Once the store has seen some traffic — around 100 views per product — it can start populating the products.
This panel can be enabled or disabled in the Display Settings under Enable ‘Customers Also Viewed’? Beneath it, the Products Related by ‘Views setting allows you to set the number’ of products.
The example below shows the Customers Also Viewed panel from John Mitchell Systems hair care products and styling tools store.
Product Pick List Option
A product pick list option allows customers to add an additional product that complements the main selected product. When a user clicks the Add to Cart button the selected add-on product is included in the same line item as the main product.
This can be used to upsell related products and add-ons or to bundle products together.
There are two major uses for the product pick list option: upselling with add value accessories or providing options when bundling products together.
Upselling with Add Value Accessories
Product pick lists can be used to upsell with add value accessories or components. For example, if one of your products was an office desk, you could use a product picklist option to offer cable management component or power strip. You could even combine it with a price change rule or SKU product data.
Bundling Products Together
To be able to sell more to the same customers or potential new customers, you need to allow them to purchase multiple products at once. Product pick lists can also be used if you’re selling a “bundle” of individually purchasable products. For example, Solo Stove is selling a bonfire bundle that consists of a bonfire and a stand. Solo Stove uses product pick list options to give shoppers a choice of bonfire with shield, bonfire shelter, roasting sticks, or fire pit tools to include. Each choice (bonfire with shield, bonfire shelter, roasting sticks, or fire pit tools) is its product pick list option.
Conclusion
Marchants have to balance their attention between online advertising that drives traffic, sales conversions and tactics that increase sales revenue per acquired customer. Optimizing investments in acquisition, conversion and average revenue per order is critical to ecommerce profitability.
You can increase your revenue without introducing new products by simply offering creative ways to get people to buy things at the same time.
Cross-selling, ads-on and product bundling are proven tactics to sell more and improve return on customer acquisition investments.
