Cross-selling vs upselling: what's the difference? [2023]

Team TeachWiki

The main objective of an eCommerce is to achieve sales and retain customers, but one of the biggest concerns of an eCommerce is also to increase the value of the shopping cart and the average spending per customer and in this article we will tell you how to use some sales techniques to make your eCommerce work even better.

What is cross-selling?

It is known as cross-selling, or cross-selling, that sales strategy that consists of offering one or several complementary products to the main purchase intention , both before and after completing the purchase in eCommerce.

Cross-selling is also known as the sales multiplier strategy, since by suggesting products related to the product that a user has in the basket, you can easily increase the value of the sale and the average number of products per cart.

In physical stores, cross-selling items would be those that are near the checkouts, those that you pick up just before paying for your purchase.

If your eCommerce is developed with Magento, you can apply this cross-selling strategy with the automatic related products extension.

What is upselling?

The sales and marketing technique of upselling consists of offering the customer a product similar to the one they want to buy but with which a greater profit is achieved . For this technique to work, some factors must be taken into account such as:

The main advantages of upselling are that the user's expectations are exceeded and they are more satisfied and that income is increased.

If your eCommerce is developed with Magento, you can apply this upselling technique with the “Cross-sell / Upsell Products” extension.

Examples of cross-selling and upselling

So that you can better understand how these two techniques work, we give you an example so that you can visually see it very clearly. As you will see, in the image a customer initially intended to buy only a blue t-shirt, but with cross-selling the retail eCommerce manages to increase the value of the cart when the customer adds the jeans. And with the upselling technique, the customer exchanges the blue t-shirt (which he does not buy) for another red one of a higher value, with which the eCommerce obtains a greater benefit, since the Customer LifeTime Value increases.

Benefits of the cross-selling technique and the upselling technique

Using these two marketing strategies correctly in your eCommerce, you can achieve the following benefits:

Without a doubt, cross-selling and upselling help to get more sales quickly, practically and easily to multiply the turnover of your eCommerce.

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