Cross sell to grow your average order amount

Published on April 30, 2012 Cross sell to grow your average order amount

If you shop in your local supermarket, have a look at what you see at the end of each aisle – promotional products that you might not otherwise buy put there to encourage you to put more things into your cart. Look at the items in each section of the shelves and you’ll see promotional stickers and items on sale next to items that are not. You’ll also see items grouped with similar items next to eachother. This is no accident – it’s a deliberate retail marketing strategy used by supermarkets to increase average order amounts.

These techniques are tried and proven retail strategies do drive extra sales from customers. The good news is that online your shopping cart website can also replicate these types of techniques in many different ways. One of these is offering cross sells on the product pages of your store.

In Ozcart shopping cart websites there are three main types of cross selling that you can use:

1. Automatic cross selling – the cart automatically displays products that other people purchased when you view a product
2. Deliberate cross selling – choosing products to show up on the page when particular products are viewed
3. Showing multi-buy or combination buying specials on the page when particular products are viewed

Automatic cross selling is the easiest of these to implement because once it’s turned on the cart does the rest. It’s easy for customers too, because people see the products that other people found popular. The downside of this method is that the products that are popular together may mean some products do not show up for cross selling, and the most profitable products might not be the ones that are being purchased.

For more control than “people who brought this also bought this” automatic cross selling, manual cross selling can be helpful. Manual cross sells allow you to define exactly what products show up when other products are displayed. You can also define the exact order that these are displayed in. This is useful for cross selling low profit with high profit items, selling items that are complementary together e.g. a dress and accessories.

Multi buy combination buying specials – like buy a T shirt get a watch free are also possible and ways to promote more expensive items in your online store. Ozcart™ allows you to offer the following multi buy specials:

• Discount off a category when a product is purchased (20% off business shirts)
• Discount off one product when another is purchased (buy a cruise experience and get 50% off a premium leather suitcase)
• Discount off a category (buy any shirt and get any tie free)
• Two for one products (buy a shirt get another identical shirt free)
• Two for one categories (buy a shirt get any other shirt free)

Cross selling and multi buy specials can help improve combination purchases and increase average order values in your online store.