Getting started with upsells and cross-sells
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to upsells and cross-sells for teams who have not touched it before.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The reason this keeps coming up
Relevance beats volume every time. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- The confirmation page is an underused place to suggest more
- Change one thing and measure it
Aggressive upsells at checkout increase abandonment. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
In practice
Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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
- Aggressive upsells at checkout increase abandonment — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.