Turn One Purchase into Many: 5 Tips for Cross-Selling on Shopify

If a customer is excited enough to punch that “buy now” button for one product on your Shopify store, there's a chance they may want to buy another. You just need to help them find it. But how?

Get good at cross-selling.

Cross-selling is a sales technique that shows customers similar or complementary products based on the product they are interested in. If a customer is browsing swimsuits, they might also see popular sandals at the bottom of the product page. Apparel sites often use cross-selling to encourage shoppers to "complete the look" with matching clothing articles or accessories.

Cross-selling on your Shopify store is crucial to your growth strategy, helping you learn more about your customers and personalize their experience.

Why Cross-Sell on Your Shopify Store

If you’ve ever put a large pizza with extra black olives in your cart and gotten a popup tempting you with breadsticks, you’ve seen cross-selling first-hand.

Cross-selling is a standard practice for many online stores for several reasons. Making popular or complementary products easily findable simplifies the shopping experience, builds loyalty, and increases your average order value.

Here are a few of the benefits of cross-selling on your ecommerce store:

🔋 Reduces decision fatigue

Your customer doesn’t have to scroll through product after product to find the perfect something. You’ve hand-delivered user-friendly options based on what they’ve already told you they like.

🤝 Builds customer loyalty

By suggesting add-ons that you know your existing customers love, there is a good chance this new customer will love it, too. And now that this is their favorite product, they will come back for more, increasing your conversion rate as well.

🛍️ Enhances the customer experience

Add cross-selling options throughout the customer journey, including the product page, during the checkout process, and even post-purchase, to see what is most effective.

📈 Increases your AOV

Your average order gets a boost when your customer comes for one item and finds two (or more) that they decide to buy.

📦 Helps with inventory control

You can highlight and bundle overstocked products or items with a higher margin, giving you more flexibility in how you source your products and in what quantities.

💁 Provides concierge service

Everyone wants to feel special. When you serve up personalized cross-sell offers, your customers feel like they have a personal shopper at their fingertips.

Now, let's look at five ways to include cross-selling in your ecommerce business so you can start seeing these benefits for yourself.

1. Incorporate Product Bundles

One way to meet the needs of your customers — including needs they may not realize they have — is with product bundles. You can group products together and make it easy to buy all the items at once.

If a customer is admiring a moisturizing face mask, you might bundle that with similar products, such as your popular eye serum and cuticle cream. If your customers are price-sensitive, you can even provide a discount on the bundle.

Primally Pure powers up their Shopify store with product bundles you can add to the cart with one click. 

2. Offer Related Products

Make sure your customers get everything they need to enjoy their purchase. Suggest additional products that complement the one your customer is eyeing. For example, if they have added bed sheets to their cart, you might suggest new pillows. If they select a sterling silver ring, offer a cleaning kit to keep it looking shiny.

Related products — so easy, so effective. Tail displays a recommendation widget on every product page. This product page features a cross-sell carousel showing more skorts and the matching top.

3. Highlight Products Frequently Bought Together

This is the surprise and delight part of your cross-selling strategy. Play personal shopper by showcasing items that other customers bought along with the product your customer is checking out.

If you find that customers who purchase the lavender linen spray often purchase an eye mask, you can cross-sell them on each page. Some may be obvious — like hiking boots and thick socks — but dig into your data and see if there may be something more niche. Perhaps a specific travel bag works perfectly for people in a hybrid work environment, so you find people purchasing it more with office supplies than vacation-themed items.

And to demonstrate, here' s Olly offering gummy packs frequently bought together. But wait. They go one step further by using a bundle widget to add them all to the cart with one click. Boom!

4. Spotlight Your Top Sellers

Give your customers a little FOMO by highlighting what other shoppers are adding to their carts. Base these cross-sell recommendations on your sales data, not what the individual added to their cart.

The product recommendations should change based on contextual data, such as the time of year or the location of your customer’s ISP. You may find your cocktail mixes are popular on weekends, but your coffee blends spike on Mondays. Or you may find customers who come from your social media channels lean toward certain products, but those who find you through SEO are drawn to a different category.

File this one under "clever." KNKG showcases  Top Sellers on all of their 404 pages, turning a dead end into a new beginning. Rad!

5. Make Personalized Recommendations

Customers have tasted personalization, and they like it. 77% of shoppers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides personalized experiences. Use the customer’s purchase and browsing histories and billions of other data points to dish up recommended products that match their individual preferences.

Instead of it being a one-to-one recommendation — you are on the product page for this candle, you might also like this bath bomb — you can draw more conclusions by using customer data like purchase history, items in their cart, geographic location, and more.

Image 1 of 2: Personalizing language and product recommendations improves the shopping experience. (Swipe right to see how it's done with Rebuy.)

Image 2 of 2: For this example, we show customers their previous purchases and use metadata to display their name in the widget title. A little personalization can go a long way!

Good Data Analysis Drives Effective Cross-Selling

From first-party data to purchase history and more, your customers give you a lot of information about how they travel through your store. Make sure you collect, manage, and update that information in a way that can effectively drive your cross-selling and upselling efforts. Partner with a platform that goes beyond basic traffic numbers to provide you with AI insights you can’t get with Excel charts.

Want to supercharge how you cross-sell products on your Shopify app? Rebuy has the tools to help you understand your customers better so you can create recommendations that improve loyalty and boost sales quickly. 

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