A practical checklist for upsells and cross-sells

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time upsells and cross-sells comes up.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Relevance beats volume every time
• The confirmation page is an underused place to suggest more
• Aggressive upsells at checkout increase abandonment
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Relevance beats volume every time. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about upsells and cross-sells before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The confirmation page is an underused place to suggest more — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.