Is Upselling On Your Shopify Checkout Page Worth It?

Upselling is a key business practice that helps you retain existing customers — customers who, statistically, spend 67% more than new customers. There are many key moments to upsell throughout the customer journey, and upselling on your Shopify checkout page is one of your best options. By presenting the right upsell offer or order bump when a visitor has already demonstrated purchase intent, you can begin capturing more revenue and increasing customer retention, ultimately increasing your business’s profitability.

Upselling is a key tactic for capturing the value of existing customers. By integrating upsell apps into your Shopify store, you can create offers that resonate with customers, build customer lifetime value, and improve your average order value. You’ll be able to encourage existing customers to invest in a premium product by adding new features, advanced support, and expedited shipping. 
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Consider these stats from Sumo: 

• Upselling increases revenue by 10-30%, on average.
• For companies that offer them, 70-95% of revenue comes from upsells and renewals, on average. 
• Upsells are 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.

Ready to get into upselling on your Shopify checkout page? There are tons of best practices and plugins that can help you seize the moment and reach customers when their purchase intent is highest. This guide will give you the information you need to know to get started. 

What is Upselling?

By one estimate, 60-70% of sales are made to existing customers. In comparison, the likelihood of selling to a fresh prospect is only 5-20%. However, existing customers don’t automatically equal a high conversion rate. Upselling is an important practice that encourages your existing customers to continue to buy — and buy more. 

Through upselling, a merchant will convince customers to buy more expensive products related to the ones they originally intended to buy. For example, an e-commerce brand could incentivize someone to upgrade their cart to get free shipping or gift packaging without any added costs. Upselling is one of the best marketing tactics for e-commerce stores and can increase your overall rating with consumers. 

What does upselling look like in practice? An e-commerce store might install a pop-up that appears when a customer adds a product to their cart. The pop-up would encourage the customer to consider buying a higher-value item to the item they’re purchasing. For instance, the product’s upgraded model, or the same product with add-on features and value quotient. 

Upselling vs. Cross-Selling vs. Down-Selling

Upselling is often confused with a similar sales tactic, cross-selling. Cross-selling encourages a customer to buy additional products, such as accessories, related products, or extended warranty coverage. 

A simple way to think about upselling vs cross-selling is to think of the ordering experience at a fast-food restaurant. Cross-selling takes place when the cashier asks if you want to have fries and a drink with your burger. Upselling takes place when the cashier asks if you want to upgrade your order to a deluxe burger with bacon and cheese. 

What’s the difference between upselling and cross-selling? Upselling usually results in higher regular order totals. It increases potential revenue by exposing customers to higher-margin products or services. And, this tactic is likely to improve customer satisfaction by suggesting to existing customers items that are best suited to their needs. Upselling can increase overall customer lifetime value — and those all-important customer retention rates. 

 Cross-selling encourages customers to buy ancillary products or services that aren’t directly related to their initial purchase. It’s a great way to introduce existing customers to other complementary products from your brand. Often, e-commerce brands cross sell to recommend a product purchased by other customers, harnessing the power of social suggestion to increase conversion rates and customer loyalty. 

Upselling and cross-selling are both essential to improving the profitability of a company and to boost AOV (average order value) of each transaction. These techniques differ in how they impact the company. For e-commerce brands, where shipping adds a higher fixed cost to orders, maximizing the AOV can minimize the impact of these costs.

There is a third alternative known as “down-selling”. Down-selling involves offering a product or service to a customer that’s less expensive than the one initially considered. This technique provides your e-commerce brand with access to clients that have varying budgets; you may still make a sale even if the customer didn’t purchase the item you were hoping they would. Down-selling is essentially the idea that a sale is better than no sale. 

Choosing When to Upsell

There are opportunities to upsell to existing or new customers at every stage of the customer journey. Some merchants think of this process as the upsell funnel. Choosing the unique moment to upsell depends on the different paths to purchase a customer could take to complete their transaction, your product page experience, and the checkout process you’ve set up on your e-commerce site. 

Generally, there are three key moments during each order when it makes sense to upsell to customers: before the first sale, at checkout, and after purchase. Here’s an example of each option, as well as some advantages and disadvantages of each. 

Pre-Sale Upselling

Pre-sale upselling suggests ways to upgrade the purchase before the customer has entered the checkout process. Use the product pages of cheaper or more basic products and services to display premium or improved options. For example, if you’re selling backpacks, create a table on the product page of your most affordable bag that compares its features to more expensive options. Your table could show how other versions are waterproof, have more pockets, or have more capacity for carrying things. 

Pre-sale upselling is ideally used for small purchases where the risk is low, and the customer doesn’t need a lot of information about the product. Most experts suggest starting the upselling process in this phase to familiarize shoppers with the different options available to them, and then later in the checkout stage when the customer’s intent to purchase is higher. 

Checkout Upselling

The online cart or checkout page is a key moment for upselling and cross-selling. In the checkout upsell, you would inform buyers of ways they can enhance their purchase. The easiest way to make a cart upsell is by offering gift-wrapping, expedited shipping, a warranty or enhanced protection, package protection, or a subscription option for automatic refills are all ways to upsell an existing order. 

Almost half of the consumers in a Segment Survey reported that they bought an item that was recommended to them by a brand in the checkout stage. Checkout upselling helps capitalize on the customer’s intent to buy. When they’ve made it to the checkout page, there’s a good chance they’re ready to complete their purchase. Often, suggesting upgrades or useful product bundles at this stage can help grow AOV and customer loyalty — as long as your offer is truly relevant. 

Upselling at this stage is potentially risky, too. Show the wrong offer or irrelevant products, and you could risk the entire sale. 

Post-Sale Upselling

Once the order is placed, there are still ways to capitalize on upselling opportunities. A post-purchase upsell app allows customers to add upgrades to digital purchases and software. Likewise, physical products can be upgraded with an extended warranty or premium support, for example. 

Post-sale upselling may seem counterintuitive, but it’s a great way to boost sales and increase customer retention. By offering post-purchase offer, post-sale upselling gives shoppers a way to add items to their orders without impacting the original purchase — maximizing AOV in the process. Your e-commerce site benefits from that all-important first sale, and now gains the opportunity for an immediate second purchase without the need for a customer to go through the entire sale journey a second time. 

You also gain the ability to turn a new customer into a repeat customer right away. Increasing the conversion rate that quickly means your company saves on remarketing costs. It also means you start to see the benefit of existing customers sooner, rather than later. 

There are some downsides to post-purchase upselling. Keep your customer journey in mind: if someone has just seen upsell widgets, pop-ups, and reminders on multiple pages, you may be irritating them. Too many upsell efforts can damage your conversion rate. Likewise, if you feed someone a promotion that isn’t relevant to their needs, you can discourage them from coming back. Make sure your promotion is personalized for each transaction.

Benefits of Upselling at Checkout

Deliver an upsell offer at the right moment, and your conversion rates and average order value will skyrocket. When is the best moment, though? Think about your upsell offer through the lens of customer service: you’re aiming to provide someone with all the information they need to continue purchasing from your brand not only now, but well into the future. Educate someone on the offers available to them at checkout, and they’ll deliver a range of benefits to your e-commerce brand. 

Increased Revenue

Suggesting more expensive, better products is foundational to increasing sales and revenue for a business. If you can motivate each customer to spend more than they originally intended, that translates into additional incremental revenue for your business. And, if you can do so at checkout, you’ll be spending less on ad sales and marketing campaigns to increase that revenue — which could mean higher profit for your company. 

Better Customer Satisfaction

Imagine you buy a new camera for your vacation. It takes 10 business days to arrive. When the package comes in the mail, just a few days before your trip, you open it to realize the camera doesn’t come with a big enough memory card. That would be incredibly frustrating, right? 

Upsell opportunities prevent this frustration. Share an upsell opportunity directly in the cart when a customer has added an item to the cart; in just a few clicks, the customer can get everything they need from your store without having to search for the right additional features or add-on products. 

Higher Average Order Value

Average order value measures the average total of every order placed at your e-commerce store over a certain period of time. If your customer is already planning to buy from you, and has reached the checkout process, successfully upselling them an upgraded, more expensive product increases the AOV accordingly.

Why is Upselling at Checkout So Effective?

Cart upselling takes place at the last stage of the checkout process. At this point, the customer has gone through the journey and already overcome potential barriers to purchasing from your e-commerce site. They’ve measured your offer up against competitors, bought into your branding, compared pricing with other vendors, and decided your store is right for them. 

At this last stage of the buying process, upselling at checkout is a great way to capitalize on that goodwill to capture the benefits listed above in a single purchase.

Consumer Susceptibility

When customers reach checkout, they’ve already decided your brand is trustworthy and made up their minds about a particular product. They are susceptible to increasing their purchase with a better offer — especially if offered a superior product. And, with the right messaging, you can absolutely convince someone to spend more. 

FOMO Effect

FOMO — fear of missing out — is a powerful motivator. Customers want to avoid feeling like they’ve possibly missed out on getting a great deal on a better product. This fear can cloud decision-making and work in your favor. Help customers get the product they desire by informing them of all their choices at checkout. It’s also a great way to build trust with customers over time. 

Personalization

Upselling at checkout allows you to provide personalization to your customers. By delivering a tailored set of better products to someone (based on their browsing history, shopping history, customer support interactions, and more), you can show you value their patronage. Personalized offers make someone feel as if your brand truly understands their needs — encouraging them to take you up on your upsell. 

How to Upsell at Checkout

Upselling at checkout is made easy with the right app. Adding one of the best upsell apps to your website can automate the process of serving related products to a customer at the point of checkout. Here’s how introducing these apps to your Shopify site can help you upsell at checkout. 

Choose the Right Upselling App

Upsell apps make it easy to upsell to your customers at every checkout. The best Shopify upsell apps take far less time and effort than trying to upsell every cart manually. There are dozens of apps that can display upsell opportunities in the shopping cart in real-time. They present upsell products based on product recommendations from other customers, predetermined offers that you set, such as gift wrapping, and bundle products that you might find at the cashier counter at brick-and-mortar stores.

Finding the best upsell app for your business may take some trial and error. Find an app that gives you the flexibility to control how your upsell offers behave, where they are presented, and what information they pull to show the related products. Some will require you to code in order to install the app; other apps can be installed in just a few clicks. 

Consider Your Customer’s Needs

Know your audience to understand which related products are most likely to resonate. Understand each customer’s needs through customer surveys, feedback, data from their browsing and shopping histories, and from broader shopping trends. Perform regular testing to make sure the app is matching the right offer to the right customer depending on what’s already in their cart. 

Create Shopping Cart Urgency

Finally, create a sense of urgency to tap into FOMO and encourage someone to take advantage of your upsell. Set a limited time offer, or show how few products are still in stock to motivate someone to upgrade to a more expensive product. You may also want to include a widget with a countdown timer showing how much time someone has before their cart expires. 

Check out the video below if you are interested in some upselling strategies you can use for your Shopify store.

Conclusion

Upselling is a powerful way to derive the most value from your existing customers. Upselling encourages a repeat customer to buy a more expensive product. Through this practice, you can ensure higher customer satisfaction and higher revenue for your store, all in one. Upselling can be performed before checkout, during checkout, or post-purchase; but, most e-commerce merchants find success by capitalizing on cart upselling, when someone has a clear intent to buy. There are tons of Shopify upsell apps (and some that come with a free trial) that can automate this process for you. 

To learn more about upselling, check out the resources on Conversion Bear.