The key to success in ecommerce isn’t in getting new customers, it’s in getting your existing customers to keep coming back.

Getting new customers just to visit your Shopify store is hard enough, and getting them to take the next step and buy something is even trickier.

A Shopify online store lives or dies on its customer retention because it’s not sustainable or realistic to grow and scale the bottom line of an ecommerce business on new customers alone.

It's a much better use of your time to get your existing customers to buy additional products, more frequently. That's why upselling and cross-selling are so important in ecommerce. Using upsell techniques has been proven to work by the biggest online stores on the internet, and is grounded in fundamental salesmanship principles.

This guide will explain the principles of upselling and cross-selling in ecommerce, the difference between them, and best practices to implement upselling and cross-selling techniques on Shopify with real-world examples and case studies to back them up.

What Does it Mean to Upsell?

Upselling is the practice of getting customers to buy a more expensive version of the original product they originally intended to purchase to increase the value of the sale. The customer being given an upsell is offered a product that is upgraded or improved in some way - that has additional features, more functions, improved performance, has a higher value or in some way has better quality than the original product.

A product upsell increases the cart value and Average Order Value (AOV) of an initial purchase, which creates a higher ROI from your existing customers without having to generate more traffic. Upselling is standard practice in Shopify, but it’s a tried-and-true sales technique that’s used in retail to grow your company's revenue and bottom line just as often as it is in ecommerce.

Some examples of upselling you might see in day-to-day consumer behavior might look like this:

• A customer is in an Apple store, and they’re considering a standard, work-a-day, baseline iPhone SE with 64GB of storage space for $429. The sales rep at the Apple store convinces the customer to buy an upgraded iPhone SE with more storage space and additional features for an extra $100, or even the current iPhone 14 model at $799
• You’re in the market for a used car. You have your eye set on a just-the-basics 4-door Sedan with no extra frills and whistles. The salesman at the lot persuades you to buy the latest hybrid
• You’re at a hardware and electronics store shopping for a laptop. You’re thinking about a Chromebook or a Lenovo ThinkPad that’s just enough for working and light web surfing. The sales rep working in the computers department convinces you to go for the 2-in-1 laptop-tablet hybrid with 8G of RAM and 256GB of SSD

What is the Difference Between Upselling and Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling offers a customer an additional, complementary product that is related to the one being purchased during the customer journey. Although it’s also prevalent in Shopify and online retail, it’s one of the oldest sales techniques in the book. The online retail giant Amazon reported that 35% of its company’s revenue comes from cross-selling.

The terms upselling and cross-selling are often used interchangeably in the ecommerce space, in retail, and elsewhere. However, while they are often used together they refer to two separate strategies. While upselling offers people an upgrade or more expensive product than the initial purchase, cross-selling offers complimentary products or services that are related to or complement each other.

Rather than increasing a customer's average order value, cross-selling is more aimed at improving customer retention and customer satisfaction. Cross-selling offers related, complementary products that people frequently buy together.

In Shopify cross-selling, you’re offering more options, more add-ons, and selling the customer an additional product or services that they would have likely bought together anyway.

A great example of a cross-sell opportunity is buying a burger from a fast food restaurant and being asked “do you want fries with that?” Another effective strategy might be buying additional cloud storage when you buy a mobile phone, buying batteries along with a toy, or buying a case to go with your new ebook reader. 

Why You Need to Upsell in Ecommerce

At its core, growing a small business is about building better customer relationships. Upselling and cross-selling aren't just about getting more money from your customers, they're about building trust with your customers. It's a way of showing them you understand what they want and need.

The immediate benefits of upselling include increased revenue and profit with every purchase. In the long-term though, upselling and cross-selling drive repeat sales because they grow brand trust with your company by offinering your target audience additional value at the point of sale.

Increase the AOV of Your Shopify Store

Upselling is a great way for a seller to grow its average cart value and sales revenue with relatively little investment, for less effort than it would take to acquire new customers. A Shopify upsell increases the value of a purchase by 10-30% on average.

Improve Customer Retention

It's much less expensive to retain your existing customers and get them to make repeat purchases than it is to get new ones.

Upsells are 68% more profitable than acquiring new customers.  Existing customers are also 50% more likely to buy new products and spend 31% more compared to new customers.

Longer Customer Lifetime Value

Upselling and cross-selling don’t just get your existing customers to spend more, they get them to keep doing business with you for longer. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while selling to a new customer is just 5-20%.

How Upselling and Cross-Selling Works on Shopify

The actual mechanism of setting-up Shopify upsells and cross-sells isn’t as involved as the higher-level strategy and best practices you use, although it does require the use of a Shopify app such as Honeycomb.

Generally, you can promote the main product you intend to upsell or cross-sell either during or after the customer makes a purchase.

There are four main places in the customer experience you can upsell or cross-sell to your Shopify user:

• Pop-Ups: Upselling a product that your customer is currently viewing puts your upsell offer directly in front of your customers. This is the most in-your-face upselling tactic
• Product Page: Here, your cross-sell product offers are placed somewhere under the product description, typically with the section heading “Customers Also Bought”
• Cart Page: Upsells and cross-sells can also be triggered during the checkout purchase, right before the customer makes up their mind and completes the point of sale. This is also known as an “order bump”
• Checkout: The cross-sell offer is made after the customer has already completed a purchase. After a customer buys laptops or digital cameras online, they might be given the option to add relevant products like external hard-drives or a memory card
• Email Sequences: A great place to promote your upsell offers is in your marketing emails. Upselling and cross-selling can also be a part of your lead nurturing strategy if you offer deals and recommended products in your follow-up emails based on their purchase history

You also have options on the types of upsells and cross-sells you use in your store as well:

• Discounts: Customers can redeem online coupons for related products on their next purchase
• Subscriptions: You can bring customers back month-over-month by turning a one-time purchased product into a recurring one

Upselling Strategies on Shopify (With Examples)

So much for how a Shopify upsell works on paper, but how does it work in a real-life customer journey? Here are some different ways an upselling sales strategy works in practice that you can try using for your own Shopify store:

1. Offer a Discount

It’s easier for a prospective customer to say yes to an upsell if they get more bang for their buck.

Heirloom popcorn brand Pipcorn offers their customer base a 10% discount on their popcorn sampler pack if their users upgrade their one-time purchase to a subscription, where the same sampler pack is delivered every two or four weeks.

2. Create a Sense of Urgency

A good way to make a prospective customer take the leap and spend more money on an upsell or cross-sell is to create a sense of urgency. It's an effective strategy to convince them that they’re missing out if they don’t buy the better product. A good example on Shopify or in ecommerce is to promote an additional product that has limited stock - get one now while you can!

3. Create Product-Tiers

The goal of successful Shopify upselling and cross-selling is to convince your new prospect that they're getting real value for their money. Before executing your upselling strategies, first, spend some time organizing your product categories and price ranges.

What products go together? What versions of the same main product have more enhanced features and uses? Why would your target audience want to buy this additional item, on top of what they’ve already put in their cart? Many of the best Shopify upsell apps will automate a lot of this process for you.

A jewelry ecommerce store used Honeycomb to sort out and catalog the thousands of different variants and combinations in their inventory. Creating product categories and pricing tiers on auto-pilot freed up space to create the perfect upselling funnels to their buyers, leading to a 9.68% conversion rate and $2,263 in their company's revenue over a 7-day sales period.

4. Personalize Your Recommendations

Making targeted upselling recommendations based on what your customer frequently buys or has bought before can go a long way towards showing you understand them and that you see them as individuals with needs rather than robots to be sold to.

5. Offer Free Shipping

This one is a no-brainer. If you’re trying to persuade a customer to fork over more money for a better product, it’s a harder sell if they have to pay extra for shipping for that product too.

Cross-Selling Strategies on Shopify (With Examples)

Cross-selling on Shopify has its own set of commonly used techniques and strategies, that play off of a customer's natural tendency to buy similar products or frequently-bought items together. Here are some of the things you should factor into your decision-making process:

1. Choose Relevant Products

Cross-selling only works if the items being cross-sold make sense to buy together, rather than separately.

A Canadian woman's undergarment store used Honeycomb by Conversion Bear to identify upsell opportunities for their line of woman’s panties. They built an upsell funnel that was activated every time a customer purchased a bra, and gave an additional offer for a matching pair of panties for 30% off. That clever decision-making led to a soaring 24.29% conversion rate over a week of testing.

2. Bundle Similar Products Together

Rather than offering cross-selling products individually, you can bundle multiple products together and given them a discounted price for maximum value. It's a simple way to sweeten the deal.

The national retail giant Walmart does this well on their product pages, which have a "Complete the Look" section for their woman's clothing that offers relevant suggestions to make a matching outfit. A woman's cardigan might be bundled together with matching heeled boots, black dress pants, and a purse or wallet chain.

3. Make Use of Pop-Ups

Pop-ups give an immediacy that more subtle cross-selling sales tactics do not. It's an excellent opportunity to combine discounts or bundle deals to lower the perceived risk of buying multiple products together.

Just remember not to be too pushy on the cross-selling, at the risk of driving your current customer away rather than getting them to come back. Overdoing it on the pop-ups or personalized recommendations for an alternative product can come across as spammy or intrusive. That isn’t what you want for your marketing campaigns.

The product you are upselling or cross-selling shouldn't exceed more than 25% of your customers' shopping cart value. This is known as the 25% rule.

Benefits of Using a Shopify Upselling App

Shopify ecommerce store owners who are serious about scaling their business will have to implement upselling and cross-selling strategies in their marketing campaigns to remain profitable. Fortunately, once you’ve figured out all the higher-level decision-making and sales tactics, setting up the upsell funnels themselves is pretty straightforward. Using an upselling app removes a lot of the tedious busywork involved in categorizing your products and then setting them up on your product pages and checkout.

Targeted Recommendations

Successful upselling and cross-selling is contingent on giving your potential buyer the right product to upsell them with. An app can give your customers the most likely product offerings to succeed based on your customer data, all you'd need to do is set up a few rules and trigger events.

Automated Categorization

This one is especially important if your ecommerce store has a lot of SKU numbers, color or size variations, or just a big variety of products. Rather than sorting through your catalog for hours, Shopify upselling apps can create categories and pricing tiers for upgrades and relevant products with a few toggle-able options.

Integration With Your Current Marketing Stack

If you’re already using pop-ups or marketing emails, an upselling and cross-selling app can launch your upsell offers without you having to code them yourself from scratch.

Best Shopify Upsell and Cross-Sell Apps

There are 472 upselling and cross-selling apps on the Shopify store. They all have similar functionality but come with different fine-tuning and customization options that make them fit a particular type of Shopify store or product niche.

These are some of the best ones on the Shopify app store you should consider for your own upselling strategy.

Honeycomb by Conversion Bear

Just like any other marketing strategy, upselling and cross-selling requires continual testing and optimization to make them run as efficiently as possible and generate the highest possible ROI.

Using Honeycomb by Conversion Bear lets you create A/B tests to continually tweak and improve your upselling funnels for both pre and post-checkout upsells and cross-sells. This makes it easy to try different approaches to and find the sweet spot that works best. Honeycomb lets you make streamlined funnels with one-click upsells, that make it easy for your customers to buy your upsell offers.

OrderBump

One of the most important rules of marketing is to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time, and this is just as true of upselling and cross-selling as it is anywhere else.

This is the area where OrderBump shines brightest. OrderBump's defining feature is auto-bumps, which dynamically recommend products based on what the customer already has in their shopping cart. The app is also speed-tested to have minimal impact on your Shopify store's performance and is optimized for mobile devices.

‍

Make Your Upsell Into an Easy Sell

The success of your Shopify store depends on repeat business, and your ability to capitalize on the customers you already have, rather than continually scramble to get new customers who just buy one thing and then never come back. As is always the case in online business, success in upselling is about giving the right offer to the right people.

The most valuable benefits of upselling and cross-selling on Shopify are:

• Increased revenue and profit
• Stronger brand trust and customer loyalty
• Improved customer retention
• Longer customer lifetime value

Check out Honeycomb by Conversion Bear and create upselling and cross-selling strategies that will make your store practically run itself!

‍