Maximising your web sales with upselling
Tuesday, 05 May 2009 21:21
Getting people through the door, or to the web site, is job number one for retailers. However, it’s not everything. Just as on the High Street, the process of selling to customers doesn’t end when they reach your web site, that’s where it starts.
If you want to be successful, it’s good to balance the cost of getting traffic - through search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) - alongside other activities on your site. Increasing conversion and driving up the average order value can mean the difference between success and failure, or maybe a moderate versus a fantastic business.
Thus “sales maximisation” is often seen as the Nirvana of online trading and the good news is that if you have a half-decent ecommerce solution, it’s not that difficult to work on maximising your sales. There are a number of simple techniques you can use to persuade buyers to part with more of their cash. Some of these can also increase sales conversions, so they are well worth a try.
1 “Best Sellers” and “New Products”
The most common and obvious technique is to provide a list of top sellers on the home page and provide a list of new products elsewhere on the site. Nothing can be more convenient than zero clicks away, and the products most likely to attract interest from people who weren’t planning to purchase are your top sellers. Obviously, new products can promote fresh interest from existing customers, so a new products page will also help.
2 Make a bundle
Everyday low prices seem to work for supermarkets – people have to buy food and by shopping regularly, they appreciate the true cost of their weekly trip. For stores which are less regularly visited, there are better ways of working. This means following one of the most basic rules of price merchandising – always give more for more money. Never just provide a straight discount.
The key is to try to hook the buyer with a solid offer, then once they have decided to buy, entice them to part with more of their cash with an even better value offer.
An example would be where a set of six wine glasses, say, are half the price per glass of a single goblet. The buyer initially only puts one glass in his cart, but when presented with the right offer they may feel that they would be getting better value if they bought a set, given that glasses break easily.
The technique can be used with numbers – the larger the quantity bought, the lower the price. Or try bundles, where the cost of the bundle is less than its constituent parts.
3 Accessorise
Another technique is “would you like fries with that?”. Using this approach Roopesh Patel at Aidmobility (www.aidmobility.co.uk) has seen a 700% increase in sales of cushions for wheelchairs, and 900% in walking stick accessories. Accessories are provided as options to the main products using a check box. So, when the buyer selects the main product, they can buy additional options with a single click.
This is a treble win as there is a small saving when the accessory is bought like this, but the buyer also saves time in finding the option and saves hassle from working out what goes with what. The assurance that the option will actually work with the main product is also likely to reduce queries and increase conversion.
4 Multiple discounts
Alistair Barron at Weather Shop (www.ukweathershop.co.uk) is another keen exponent of add-on options and multiple discounts. Alistair comments, “We make a lot of use of components (the Actinic term for an option with a non-standard price) to persuade people to buy additional sensors for their electronic weather stations. Typically they save a few pounds and we save postage and sell more product. We go through shed loads of additional sensors as a result.”
He continues, “With the expensive US weather stations, we offer all sorts of bundled items and configured versions. We probably sell more of this kit than the rest of the other UK retailers put together. With traditional items we offer discounts when people buy sets of two or three instruments. It means we sell quite a bit of this kit.”
Alistair is currently working on his next move – up-selling in the shopping cart. This requires fairly sophisticated software, and works as follows. After one or more items have been added to the cart, where appropriate, the buyer receives a message in the form of: “Buy another x and you can receive any of y at half price”. Obviously there are many variants on this theme, but the principle is the same – spend more to get a better deal. The beauty of this is that you can extend the range of things that can be offered, and you are trying to persuade the shopper to buy more all of the way to the checkout.
5 “Also Bought”
Another approach, pioneered by Amazon, analyses the previous and current purchasing history of the buyer. They are then offered a list of products that they might be interested in, because buyers with similar tastes also bought them. This is particularly likely to work for products like gadgets, games, books and music..
The big advantage of the internet is that it is easy to try things out, measure the results and adjust accordingly. Do these techniques really represent the Nirvana of online sales? Well not really. But with careful application there is scope for both an increase in sales and an increase in net margin. It may not be magic, but it certainly is worthwhile.
Chris Barling is CEO of ecommerce and EPOS systems supplier Actinic. Originally published on BusinessZone.