Many eCommerce business owners think that to make more money you need more traffic. Although it is true, more traffic can equal more money, there are other ways to increase your revenue without getting one more visitor to your website and we will be discussing one of them today, more specifically up-selling.
Upsells, if you don’t know what that is, means if you’re selling a product and a customer is about to buy you present them with an offer of another product. We’re going to talk about some ways to do that.
A lot of people think that to grow your sales you need more traffic. More traffic, more sales, more money. That’s true; if you get more traffic you’ll make more money. The problem is getting more traffic isn’t easy. Upselling is a really effective way to get the most out of your traffic.
There’s a lot of different ways to do upsells and if you don’t do them right they don’t work. If I’m selling footballs and trying to upsell someone a basketball the customer is probably not going to buy a basketball. It would make much more sense to offer them a football pump.
Places to do upsells (test and look at the data to see what works for your product)
- When someone adds a product to their cart
- When someone is in the cart ready to check out
- Immediately after they have placed an order
- Through email
. In most cases, you can do this after the person has bought the previous item in their cart. Once they’ve purchased they’re not going to ask for a refund just because you’re trying to sell them another product. You have already gotten over the biggest hurdle which is establishing their trust. They don’t have to add their credit card information again, they just hit one button and it’s added to the order. Also, depending on what the product is you can typically offer a higher priced item.
Three ways to make money from an eCommerce website:
- Higher conversion rate for your website
- More traffic
- Bringing up your average order value
These are the only three ways to make money. So if you can take the traffic you have and just increase the average order value you’ve just increased your revenue by that amount. If your average order value is $50 and you can get that to $100 you have just doubled your revenue and you didn’t even bring one more person to your website.
If you do this right the industry average for conversion is 30% for upsell. This depends on you doing it properly and will change depending on how expensive your products are and the industry you’re in.
Ways to upsell:
- Offer the same product, just more quantity.
- Offer an accessory to the product you just sold.
- Offer an upgrade to the product
- Some who don’t have anything to upsell have offered a faster shipping method