How to increase your cross- and upselling revenue in 2022?

2021 has been another eventful year for businesses. New technologies occurred that came along with some challenges but more importantly, new opportunities. Such opportunities will occur even more in the future since technology is changing so rapidly and providing businesses with ways of improving their efficiency and their revenue. Actively adapting to new technologies is often related to a motivation of constant progression. For eCommerce retailers and wholesalers that sell many products, this motivation could lead to competitive advantage, which you obviously want to achieve. This article will discuss the new technologies related to cross selling and upselling that could increase your organization’s revenue in 2022. Moreover, the importance of data within these new technologies is described.

 

Cross selling and upselling

Before diving into new technologies, the concepts of cross- and upselling will be explained briefly. These two practices are particularly known for online stores, but they have been around offline stores for a long time: when you order a hamburger in a fast-food restaurant, you’re probably asked if you want fries and a soda with it. This is a great example of cross-selling. Cross-sells are defined as products that are promoted based on your current choice for a product. So, when buying a new hoodie from your favorite brand, you may be advised to buy sweatpants that fit your hoodies’ style, a shirt to wear underneath your hoodie and a hat that matches with your new hoodie. Though technique is pretty well-known and it’s obviously just another attempt from the seller to make the customer spend more money in his store, it does actually work. Offering cross-selling possibilities on your website will contribute to a higher revenue since the average total order value increases.

 

Upselling is a similar technique but instead of offering complementary products, sellers offer products that are recommended instead of the currently viewed product. In this way, sellers aim to sell products that are more profitable, more expensive or of more quality. Customers may feel like the current product doesn’t live up to their expectations, and then they may be interested in buying a better and/or more expensive product. This could contribute to more revenue since the customer has the option of spending more in your store.

 

Not only do these techniques contribute to your revenue, but they also enrich the customer experience. Imagine that your customer is looking for complementary products or a more expensive product, but these products are not recommended. Then the customer needs to search them by himself and this takes more time and less convenience. All in all, it can be concluded that cross- and upselling techniques provide opportunities to improve the customer experience and increase the overall revenue. So how can you implement these techniques on your eCommerce website to achieve this competitive advantage?

 

New technologies and the importance of data

The importance of providing cross- and upsells has now been indicated: now we’re going to take a look at the new techniques that could increase your organization’s revenue and efficiency. First of all, it’s relevant to know that cross- and upsells can only be provided when accurate product relationships are detected. In order to detect these relationships, your product data needs to be of sufficient quality and quantity. If both your data quality and quantity are fine, you’re all good. But many organizations don’t even know how good their data is and how much data they possess: for these organizations, the first step is to make sure that there is a sufficient amount of proper data. In order to do this, you could choose to optimize your data quality and/or quantity. After this process has been accurately performed, you will be able to detect product relationships in an easier way and you can offer upsells and cross sells to your customers. Sounds easy, right?

 

Easy-peasy, indeed. But there are some sidenotes to the story. First of all, it isn’t easy to optimize your data quality and quantity. Doing this manually will take you lots of time, especially if your organization offers many products of which the data needs to be processed. A more efficient option would be to automate this process: certain software tools could help you in performing the task. One of these tools is Powerenrich.ai: this tool is able to enrich your existing data based on your preferred extraction source, whether this is an image, PDF, or webpage. In this way, both your data quality and quantity can be increased while saving lots of valuable time and money.

 

Automated cross- and upselling

Now that the importance of data has been described, it’s time to see how this data can be used to increase your 2022 revenue by simply offering cross- and upsells. To detect product relationships, data from many products need to be compared. Comparing all of these products manually is an extremely time-consuming task that goes along with many unnecessary costs. So, in order to optimize the efficiency of this process you could decide to automate it. Again, there are tools for this: Powerrelate.ai is one of them. The software uses smart algorithms to detect different kinds of relationships between products, namely product variants, alternatives, and accessories. In this way, you can offer your customers cross- and upsell products to increase the average order value and by this, your revenue. Moreover, using this software enables your organization to save a lot of valuable time and unnecessary costs.