Ecommerce Personalization: The Complete Guide for Founders, Merchants, and Marketers
Your ecommerce personalization journey starts here.👇
Maximize your Shopify sales with cross-selling! Discover why you should cross-sell and learn effective techniques to boost AOV for your Shopify store.
If a customer is excited enough to punch that “buy now” button for one product on your Shopify store, there's a chance they may want to buy another. You just need to help them find it. But how?
Get good at cross-selling.
Cross-selling is a sales technique that shows customers similar or complementary products based on the product they are interested in. If a customer is browsing swimsuits, they might also see popular sandals at the bottom of the product page. Apparel sites often use cross-selling to encourage shoppers to "complete the look" with matching clothing articles or accessories.
Cross-selling on your Shopify store is crucial to your growth strategy, helping you learn more about your customers and personalize their experience.
If you’ve ever put a large pizza with extra black olives in your cart and gotten a popup tempting you with breadsticks, you’ve seen cross-selling first-hand.
Cross-selling is a standard practice for many online stores for several reasons. Making popular or complementary products easily findable simplifies the shopping experience, builds loyalty, and increases your average order value.
Here are a few of the benefits of cross-selling on your ecommerce store:
Your customer doesn’t have to scroll through product after product to find the perfect something. You’ve hand-delivered user-friendly options based on what they’ve already told you they like.
By suggesting add-ons that you know your existing customers love, there is a good chance this new customer will love it, too. And now that this is their favorite product, they will come back for more, increasing your conversion rate as well.
Add cross-selling options throughout the customer journey, including the product page, during the checkout process, and even post-purchase, to see what is most effective.
Your average order gets a boost when your customer comes for one item and finds two (or more) that they decide to buy.
You can highlight and bundle overstocked products or items with a higher margin, giving you more flexibility in how you source your products and in what quantities.
Everyone wants to feel special. When you serve up personalized cross-sell offers, your customers feel like they have a personal shopper at their fingertips.
Now, let's look at five ways to include cross-selling in your ecommerce business so you can start seeing these benefits for yourself.
1. Incorporate Product Bundles
2. Offer Related Products
3. Highlight Products Frequently Bought Together
4. Spotlight Your Top Sellers
5. Make Personalized Recommendations
One way to meet the needs of your customers — including needs they may not realize they have — is with product bundles. You can group products together and make it easy to buy all the items at once.
If a customer is admiring a moisturizing face mask, you might bundle that with similar products, such as your popular eye serum and cuticle cream. If your customers are price-sensitive, you can even provide a discount on the bundle.
With dynamic bundles, you can use data to automatically group products based on user behavior. Layer A/B testing to make sure you are creating the bundles that resonate best with your customers. Depending on your data, some product bundles might make for a good subscription.
Make sure your customers get everything they need to enjoy their purchase. Suggest additional products that complement the one your customer is eyeing. For example, if they have added bed sheets to their cart, you might suggest new pillows. If they select a sterling silver ring, offer a cleaning kit to keep it looking shiny.
Tap into real-time and historical shopping behavior to produce a personalized shopping experience for your customers. Segmentation and contextual data, such as the shopper’s location, may influence the related product recommendations. If a person in Portland purchases an umbrella, you might offer a heavy coat. If a customer in Miami buys the same umbrella, you might suggest a light jacket due to the warmer climate.
This is the surprise and delight part of your cross-selling strategy. Play personal shopper by showcasing items that other customers bought along with the product your customer is checking out.
If you find that customers who purchase the lavender linen spray often purchase an eye mask, you can cross-sell them on each page. Some may be obvious — like hiking boots and thick socks — but dig into your data and see if there may be something more niche. Perhaps a specific travel bag works perfectly for people in a hybrid work environment, so you find people purchasing it more with office supplies than vacation-themed items.
Use customer data to determine which products end up in your customers’ carts at the same time or at a later date. Promote the other frequently purchased item on the product page or as an in-cart checkout extension popup. Mention that other customers buy these items together to clarify why you are suggesting it.
Give your customers a little FOMO by highlighting what other shoppers are adding to their carts. Base these cross-sell recommendations on your sales data, not what the individual added to their cart.
The product recommendations should change based on contextual data, such as the time of year or the location of your customer’s ISP. You may find your cocktail mixes are popular on weekends, but your coffee blends spike on Mondays. Or you may find customers who come from your social media channels lean toward certain products, but those who find you through SEO are drawn to a different category.
Highlight your best-selling products in a rotating carousel on your home page, at the bottom of your product pages, on the checkout page, or even on your 404 pages. Make it dynamic, and automate updates by using real-time buyer data to catch your customer’s attention.
Customers have tasted personalization, and they like it. 77% of shoppers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides personalized experiences. Use the customer’s purchase and browsing histories and billions of other data points to dish up recommended products that match their individual preferences.
Instead of it being a one-to-one recommendation — you are on the product page for this candle, you might also like this bath bomb — you can draw more conclusions by using customer data like purchase history, items in their cart, geographic location, and more.
Use AI to combine what you know about the specific customer’s purchase history and what customers typically buy together to suggest relevant products. Use personalized product recommendations on the cart page, in your post-purchase offers, or even on your thank you page or the order tracking page. You can also provide limited-time offers immediately after checkout or in your email marketing follow-up.
Your ecommerce personalization journey starts here.👇
From first-party data to purchase history and more, your customers give you a lot of information about how they travel through your store. Make sure you collect, manage, and update that information in a way that can effectively drive your cross-selling and upselling efforts. Partner with a platform that goes beyond basic traffic numbers to provide you with AI insights you can’t get with Excel charts.
Want to supercharge how you cross-sell products on your Shopify app? Rebuy has the tools to help you understand your customers better so you can create recommendations that improve loyalty and boost sales quickly.
•••
Try Rebuy free and see why the world’s top brands use Rebuy to accelerate sales growth.
To keep up with the latest trends, platform updates, and more, follow us on LinkedIn.
Customize your Shopify Plus checkout page with Rebuy to boost AOV and drive sales using personalized upsells and cross-sell offers.
Turn your checkout page into a money-maker with these 5 upselling and cross-selling tips.
Fine-tune your upsells and cross-sells with tactics proven to increase sales, maximize AOV, and create a more intelligent shopping experience.
Stay up to date with all things Rebuy by signing up for our newsletter.