Up-Sells and Cross-Sells in Zen Cart

A popular way to increase both revenue and average order value is to offer up-sells and cross-sells in Zen Cart. What is an up-sell or a cross-sell?

Up-sell: is a sales technique whereby a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. While it usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, it can be simply exposing the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered. -Wikipedia

Cross-sell: is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. – whatis.com

Simply put, these are ways to entice your customers to buy more product from you. This is done by displaying these other products to your customers as they shop. The key is to do it in a way that benefits your customer. A list of products without some connection or benefit will not achieve this goal. It will distract and confuse your shopper and they’ll be more likely to not buy anything.

The goal is to offer additional products in a way that is helpful. For example, display batteries along side a toy that requires batteries. What you’ve done is offered something your customer needs at the time they need it. This is when they are most likely to buy.

There are a number different ways to go about offering up-sells and cross-sells in Zen Cart. For starters, Zen Cart will automatically display cross-sells.  It creates these based upon actual order history.  If a customer buy product A and product B together, it will start to show Product A on Product B’s page, and vis versa, under a section called ‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’. This is great because it requires no input from you and is based upon real customer data.

If you want something you can customize, there are several different plugins available that allow for all sorts of discounts. Better Together is one of the most popular. It is a version of the basic BOGO (Buy One, Get One) discount model.

You can specify:

• Buy item X, get item Y at a discount.
• Buy item X, get an item from category A at a discount.
• Buy an item from category A, get an item from category B at a discount.
• Buy an item from category A, get item X at a discount.

You may also specify cross-sells for any of these variants. Cross sells are the same pairings but without a discount.

The  key is to find and create these up-sells and cross-sells that benefit your customers.

If they like them, it’s the proverbial win-win. You get increased revenue and your customers get more of what they want and need conveniently and quickly.

If you know your products and customers well, many of these matches should be quick to figure out. If not, spend some time looking at order history and customer behavior. You may find you can increase both revenue and average order value in short order.

If you are not offering up-sells and cross-sells, please Contact Us to find out how you can start.