The retail landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years. Customers are more open to brand switching: a study by McKinsey found that 75% of US consumers are trying a new shopping behavior in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities.
What does this mean for your business? Maximizing the value of every sale has never been more important.
Cross-selling and upselling are two marketing practices that can help you derive the most value from each transaction. Cross-selling encourages a customer to add to their shopping cart that’s related to the primary product: an extended warranty, an additional subscription, or a complementary product (think: fries with a burger).
Upselling encourages the purchase of an upgrade, enhancement, or premium that would make the customer’s shopping cart value more expensive. You might encourage potential customers to purchase a higher-tier version of a subscription that comes with additional features, for instance. Or, continuing with the burger example —add bacon and cheese to the burger for an additional $3.
Cross-selling and upselling are crucial in e-commerce, where customers have a wealth of competitive products at their fingertips. Cross-selling enables e-commerce merchants to:
- Increase average order value (AOV)
- Increase conversion rates
- Increase customer satisfaction
Frequently bought together apps make it easy to master the art of upselling and cross-selling in your online store. These apps do the legwork for you, suggesting product recommendations to a customer that can increase AOV and maximize the value of every purchase.
In this guide, we’ll break down how a frequently bought together app works, how to find the best one for your Shopify store, and other things to consider when adding this functionality to your website.
What is a Frequently Bought Together App?
A frequently bought together app integrates with your e-commerce website to suggest additional products a customer can add to their shopping cart with just one click. The app shows as a widget either on your product page or during the checkout experience to suggest items that could go with the user’s existing basket: a memory card with a new camera, a pair of pants that matches a sweater, or a framing service to go with a digital print. A frequently bought together app uses algorithms to automate upselling and cross-selling opportunities for your e-commerce store.
How do these apps work? The simple answer is that these apps use machine learning to predict recommendations based on user data, past orders, and product type in which the customer has already shown interest.
The more technical answer: some apps use a “seed product” from which the machine learning algorithm learns other items to suggest. For instance, the AI team at ASOS uses a seed product to train the frequently bought together function to suggest different recommendations of clothes that could come together in an outfit.
“We consider an outfit to be a set of fashion items which match stylistically and can be worn together. In order for the outfit to work, each item must be compatible with all other items,” wrote Elaine Bettaney on the ASOS Tech Blog. “We use a deep neural network to learn embeddings for each item. All products in our ASOS catalogue have associated images, text descriptions and categorical attribute data and our neural network combines information from each of these sources to create the item embeddings.”
Other frequently bought together apps use similar structures to suggest products that a customer might want to add to their order. The goal of these apps is to not only increase average order value (and revenue) for the business but to suggest items that a customer might find truly valuable.
Benefits of frequently bought together apps
When implemented correctly, frequently bought together apps (also called bundler apps) are a win-win for the business and the customer.
In a survey of sales professionals, 72% of salespeople who upsell and 74% who cross-sell say that it drives up to 30% of their revenue. eCommerce stores need a way to capture additional revenue too. Amazon implemented a frequently bought together function in 2017, and today the company estimates that over 35% of its sales come from this recommendation system. That’s billions of dollars in revenue generated with minimal manual effort — no sales team necessary.
Customers, too, benefit from frequently bought together apps. When these recommendation engines suggest products that are truly helpful, it generates goodwill and can increase brand loyalty. Research shows that allowing customers to build their own bundles by selecting which products and items to add to their orders generates higher customer satisfaction than trying to upsell more rigidly. For instance, Nintendo experimented with adding video games to the purchase of its console as an upsell opportunity. Customers didn’t like it.
“Nintendo puts out only certain bundles with certain games," wrote Harvard Business Review. "If the company allowed consumers to purchase consoles with any game they wanted—create the bundle themselves—it might do even better."
This is exactly the value of a frequently bought together app. Customers can pick and choose if there are products in a collection they want to add, and businesses can capture additional revenue in the process.
What are the challenges of frequently bought together apps?
If implemented poorly, these apps can actually irritate the customer. Present recommendations for additional products at the right moment in the customer journey. For instance, showcasing potential additional products must happen before a customer clicks the buy button — not after they have checked out. Make sure you don’t suggest additional products when a customer is filling out a service complaint or feedback form.
Some of these apps aren’t simply set-and-forget sales techniques. You should review customer data often and manually update the frequently bought together app with new recommendations for a great user experience that's also fresh. This can also help you spot any accidental errors. For instance, an early problem in the Amazon app suggested items that, together, could be used to make a homemade bomb. Sold separately, the products are completely innocuous; but nevertheless, the company made news headlines for the incident.
6 Best Shopify Frequently Bought Together Apps
Retail merchants on Shopify have a range of different frequently bought together apps to choose from. Each widget offers different backend features, AI algorithms, and manual recommendations vs automatic recommendations. Here’s a quick list of some of the bundle purchaser apps to choose from, and some key feature comparisons.
Let’s dive deeper into the best Shopify frequently bought together apps, presented in no particular order.
Candy Rack
Candy Rack falls on the set-it-and-forget-it end of the spectrum, offering a Smart Auto-Upsell feature that automatically defines the product type that a customer could add based on Shopify’s product recommendation API. It’s an extremely effective automated system, proven to work up to twice as better as manually-created offers.
Another key benefit of Candy Rack is it provides a way to cross-sell services, not just products. For instance, a customer could add a tailoring service to their cart when shopping for clothes, or get an onboarding session with the purchase of software.
Cross Sell Pro
Cross Sell Pro helps competitive vendors stand out with features that allow you to integrate product reviews and ratings, helping your Shopify store to increase conversions and stand out from the crowd. This feature is in addition to the algorithm, an effective way to cross-sell using the Also Bought button — which recommends what other customers have “also bought” when they had a product in their cart (prompting a shopper to add other items they didn’t realize they wanted or needed).
Shopify merchants can also enjoy the design functionality of Cross Sell Pro, which includes a Photo Gallery on Product widget with 3D animation, an appealing feature to make the visitors return.
Frequently Bought Together
Frequently Bought Together is perhaps the most popular app for presenting related items and product bundles on Shopify. This app helps customers add similar products with one click by mimicking the Amazon Bundle Recommendations, upsell features, and discounts.
The application also provides strong data tools, analyzing previous purchases from your sales records to create a “memory graph” of items that are usually added together. Feeding this information into the Frequently Bought Together AI algorithm provides more powerful automatic recommendations for your store.
Also Bought
Also Bought is by the same creators as Frequently Bought Together. This app targets the essential functions of cross-selling. This widget uses the same psychology as Amazon’s 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought' recommended products. Through either manual or automatic recommendations, you can upsell recommended products or create bundles to capitalize on cross-selling opportunities.
Upselly
Upselly is a mobile-first app, meaning it primarily targets shoppers who are browsing your e-commerce store on a mobile device. Through the Upselly widget, customers can add multiple recommended products with one click. And, if the recommended product comes with variants (e.g., a sweatshirt in different colors), customers can select the option they prefer without leaving the order process.
There’s no coding needed to install Upselly — it comes with tons of customizable options to make sure the great customer experience matches your vision
Wiser
Wiser provides advanced upsell options that show the products purchased together by previous customers with similar interests. There are a host of different ways to show related products to shoppers, including manual, automatic, and even email recommendations. Dynamic email recommendations are personalized for each customer, significantly advancing your conversion rate.
Conclusion
There’s a frequently bought together app for every merchant with a Shopify store. These apps provide a great way to increase sales and improve the customer experience in just a few clicks. By suggesting first-class product recommendations and services, merchants can increase their average order value with relatively little effort. Plus, many of these apps offer a free trial so you can measure the difference they make on your site before you pay for a subscription.
To learn more about cross-selling and upselling, and how these practices can help your business stay competitive, check out the resources on Conversion Bear.