Optimal Cross-selling for the Holidays

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Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

With the ups and downs of the market, it’s no wonder that online merchants are expecting a challenging holiday sales season this year. This makes it more important than ever to optimize every sales opportunity. If you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to focus on increasing order size by effectively cross-selling products for the holiday season.

Merchants with Yahoo! Store, Merchant Solutions Standard and Merchant Solutions Professional plans can take advantage of the cross-sell feature in a several ways:

Add-ons

If you sell products that require batteries or other accessories, add them as a cart cross-sell for those products. This way, once someone has made that first step towards purchasing, you can offer them a product that they’re going to need anyway — and they might as well buy it from you! In the case of batteries, even if they don’t need them for something they bought at your site, it may remind them that they didn’t buy batteries for a previous purchase at another store and baddabing! — you’ve just increased your order size by several dollars.

Product pairs

Last Christmas, it seemed like every kid who wanted a Hannah Montana doll also asked for a High School Musical doll (my four nieces with the same gift request has got to be a pattern!) but auto-suggestions can’t predict what new items will be hot together this year. For your newest items, go to a brick and mortar store and see how they are merchandising. Also, keep an eye on your first few orders — they will help you determine some dependable cross-sells that you can set up using cross-sell rules. Once your sales of these items are on a roll, you can opt to auto-suggest only.

If purchasing trends show that a set of items often sell together, you may also want to create a special gift set out of these items. For more about gift sets, check out a previous blog post, “Giving the Gift of Increased Order Size to Yourself.”

Unique products

Shoppers on your site may not be specifically looking for some of the unique items you have in your store, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t want them if they knew about them. I received a set of tools last Christmas from a relative who saw them while waiting in line at an auto parts store checkout (aka “cross-sell nirvana” for brick and mortar stores). Had that product not been at the checkout, he never would have thought to buy it for me, and I’d still have no pictures hung on my walls.

During the holidays, shoppers are looking for a range of gifts for a range of people. Shoppers also tend to be much more open to suggestions, unlike other times of the year when they tend to focus on a particular purchase. Think about it — how many relatives do you have to buy for? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get shopping done for multiple people at just one store? And for how many of them do you have no clue what to get? Shoppers are intent to buy, but not necessarily intent to buy one particular item, and the suggestions you give can be quite welcome to a shopper in a gift-giving conundrum.

Once the holidays are over, you should revisit your cross-sell options to make sure they still make sense. Less targeted cross-sells (like unique products) may be better placed on your home page or a featured items page, rather than distracting a customer on their path to making a purchase. It’s also a good time to turn on auto-suggest if you haven’t already, since all of your traffic and purchases from the holidays will be leveraged by the system to make auto-suggestions. If you’re still hesitant about using auto-suggest, keep in mind that, on average, auto-suggested cross-sells drive 30% higher revenue per order than merchant-created cross-sells (manual rules).

If you’re not using Cross-Sell, the holidays are a great time to start! To find out how you can get started, check out our online Cross-Sell help section.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

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