One of the best ways to encourage customers to buy more from you is by setting up WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell opportunities. When done right, it can help you subtly nudge customers in the direction of spending more money without affecting their shopping experience.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can set up upselling, product bundles, and cross-selling on your WooCommerce store – the easy way! We’ll share some best practices and examples along the way to help you get a practical understanding of how to get started. We’ll also explain how you can upsell and cross-sell to customers using WooCommerce upsell plugins.
Let's start by going over the key business benefits of upselling, product bundles, and cross-selling.
What are the benefits of upselling, product bundles, and cross-selling?
As an online store owner, you ideally want customers to buy more than one product from you at a time. This helps you increase your average order value, improve customer lifetime value, and boost sales.
Let's take a look at the differences between upselling, cross-selling, and creating product bundles, and the benefits of each strategy.
Upselling
For those unfamiliar, upselling is when you recommend a higher-priced alternative to the customer’s current consideration. The goal is to help them see value in the alternative offering and encourage them to spend more money.
For example, if you sell women’s blouses and a customer is interested in purchasing a white chiffon blouse, you might show them similar blouses by different brands and designers that are available for a slightly higher price.
Or, if you sell books and a customer is interested in the paperback version of A Dance with Dragons, you might encourage them to purchase the hardcover version instead. This is exactly how Amazon does it. It sells the hardcover version at a higher price point than the paperback version.
The great thing about setting up a WooCommerce upsell strategy is that it doesn’t just increase average order value; it also increases the customer’s lifetime value. What this means is that customers spend more at your store while they remain customers.
Cross-selling
Cross-selling occurs when you recommend related (or complementary) products based on the products customers have added to their shopping cart. Similar to upselling, the goal is to get customers to buy more from you, thus increasing your average order value.
Following our example, if a customer added the chiffon blouse to their shopping cart, you might show them other related products. For example, you could set up a Frequently bought together section or a Complete the look section that recommends pants, skirts, or jeans to go with the chiffon blouse.
Product bundles
Depending on the products you sell, it might make sense for you to create and promote product bundles. From the customer’s perspective, product bundles are high-value products that give them the most bang for their buck.
Following our example from before, if a customer expresses an interest in purchasing A Dance with Dragons hardcover book from you, you might encourage them to purchase the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series as a product bundle as they are frequently bought together.
Product bundling can be either upselling or cross-selling depending on the types of products you sell and what would deliver the most value to your customers. For example, purchasing the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series would be a product bundling and upselling strategy. But if you were to create a product bundle of The Winds of Winter hardcover book and Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 to 8 Blu-ray then that would be product bundling and cross-selling since it's a related product.
Now that we have a better understanding of what upselling, cross-selling, and product bundles are, let’s step through a quick real-world example of WooCommerce upsell and cross-sells done right.
The top WooCommerce upsell plugins to encourage customers to buy more
Store owners often take a pushy, aggressive approach which drives prospective customers away. The key to effective upselling and cross-selling is to do it subtly. Here, we’ll share some WordPress plugins that you can use to set up WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell strategies the right way.
WooCommerce Fast Cart
The WooCommerce Fast Cart Plugin offers a new and improved way to display the standard WooCommerce upsells and cross-sells. It replaces the standard multi-page cart and checkout process with a quick on-page popup cart.
When customers add a product to their cart, the fast cart options - or if you prefer, they can click on a floating cart icon to launch it. Either way, they immediately see the products in their cart with eye-catching cross-sells and upsells underneath. These appear in an interactive 'You may also be interested in...' section. Customers can click on these to immediately add them to the cart, significantly increasing your average order value.
Displaying WooCommerce cross-sells and upsells like this is much better than the usual method. That's because the process is so much faster and simpler for the customer. Their eyes are immediately drawn to the related products, making them more likely to add them to their cart.
You’re essentially replacing a cart and checkout page with a robust WooCommerce upsell popup or side cart from where the customer can edit their orders. Customers can also apply coupon codes, see related products and checkout directly. Fast Cart offers a lot of features while being simple to use, and integrates with popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
WooCommerce Product Table
WooCommerce Product Table is an order form plugin that can help you set up subtle WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It’s incredibly flexible which means you can implement it however you’d like!
One of the main reasons why it’s great for encouraging customers to buy more products is that it lists more products per page than you’d get with the default WooCommerce shop page layout. In other words, it helps you subtly upsell (or cross-sell) products by increasing product visibility.
Related: Be sure to check out our complete guide on How to Customize Your WooCommerce Checkout Page for step-by-step instructions.
Another huge benefit of using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to upsell and cross-sell to your customers is that it lets them add all the products they’d like to purchase from a single page. Customers won’t have to visit individual product pages in order to add products to their shopping cart.
With WooCommerce Product Table, customers can see which other products are available which is what cross-selling is all about. This way, they’ll be more likely to buy more from you than if they were to add products to cart from the single product page.
We recommend using the plugin’s add to cart checkboxes to make it even easier for customers to buy from you. All they have to do is tick the checkbox next to the products they’d like to purchase and add them to cart in one go. This upsell plugin also comes with search, sort, and filter options which makes it easy to quickly find what you’re looking for. Finally, you can also use it to sell product variations either by listing each variation on a separate row or by using a dropdown menu.
WooCommerce Quick View Pro
The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin offers a way to purchase from the shop or category pages. This way, customers don’t have to click through to single product pages to add products to their cart.
The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin lets you showcase products in a lightbox view. There are two ways that it helps you to sell more WooCommerce cross-sells:
- On the single product page - Each related product on the product page has a Quick View button. Customers can click this to learn more about the recommended products and add these to their cart.
- In the quick view lightbox - If a product has cross-sells attached, then these will appear in the lightbox too. Customers can click the Quick view button to add products to the cart directly from the quick view lightbox.
Use Quick View with Fast Cart 🚀
That's pretty good, but it gets even better when you use WooCommerce Quick View Pro as well as WooCommerce Fast Cart, which we looked at a minute ago. WooCommerce Fast Cart displays cross-sell products in the on-page popup cart, and Quick View displays a Quick View button for each one. That way, customers can view details of the cross-sell products, select variations and add them without closing the popup cart. Neat!
After adding products to cart, the lightbox closes and the customer can continue from where they left off (i.e. they’ll still be on the same page). They can browse other products and will be more likely to add more products to their shopping cart.
The WooCommerce Quick View Pro integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce add-ons like the Product Bundles extension which is great for implementing a product bundling and upselling (or cross-selling) strategy. Of course, is also works with WooCommerce's default product cross-sells.
Related: Read our complete guide on Quick View for WooCommerce for more information!
YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together
YITH have a cross-selling plugin called Frequently Bought Together. It's perfect to sell customers products that are related to their purchase. Let’s say a customer adds a paintbox to their cart. You can show them brushes, palettes and easels - products that other customers frequently bought together with the paintbox.
Case study – Inspire Cosmetics’ multi-step order form for cross-selling products
Inspire Cosmetics is a US-based cosmetics company that uses WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell opportunities to increase their average order value. They used the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to create a multi-step order page that intuitively leads customers through the available products.
The table layout makes it easy for them to see all of the products and options alongside each other. The benefits here are twofold: customers can see all of the products and make a quick buying decision. The product table’s add to cart checkboxes makes this an effective one-click upsell implementation.
Customers simply tick the checkbox next to the products they'd like to add to their experience box and add them to cart all at once. They can also select product variations using a dropdown menu. The best part about this sort of upselling and cross-selling strategy is that it's not too pushy.
Inspire Cosmetics designed the Build Your Own Experience Box order form using Beaver Builder and WooCommerce Quantity Manager plugins. These work perfectly with the WooCommerce Product Table quick order form.
Related: If you’re looking to sell and build your own products, check out our in-depth tutorial.
Increase your sales with WooCommerce Upsell plugins today
It’s easier to get existing customers to spend more money at your online store than attract new buyers. Implementing WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell techniques is a great way to subtly nudge customers towards adding more products to cart.
In this article, we have shared some upsell and cross-sell plugins. Each one help you implement one-click upsell and cross-sell opportunities on your online store:
- WooCommerce Fast Cart - Create a conversion-boosting popup cart and checkout, complete with product cross-sells and upsells.
- WooCommerce Product Table - Display more products per page so that customers can easily see related products and what else you have to offer.
- Quick View Pro - Speed up shopping by displaying product details and WooCommerce cross-sells in a quick view lightbox.
- YITH Frequently Bought Together - Display popular combinations of products.
Think about which combination of these plugins is the best way to encourage customers to buy more in your store. Get the plugins today, and watch your average order value grow 📈 🚀
Have you used WooCommerce upsell and cross-sell methods to increase your average order value? We'd love to hear from you so let us know in the comments section below!