Who Bought This Also Bought

Cross sells, Up sells, related products are all extremely beneficial strategies to use on your online Store.  Cross selling suggests the accessories related to the product like laptop covers, Graphic cards for PC whereas Up selling suggests more enhanced and somewhat expensive products. They provide number of benefits as listed below,

1. Visibility of your products: Whether your store is big or small, customers are able to view products which they otherwise could not.

2. Advertisement: Giving customers more options by suggesting accessories along with the selected product or with better alternatives. Both go in favor of the seller. To give you an example, if somebody purchase an IPhone and you suggest a pouch along with it or other new versions. Most likely if not all then many will surely select these accessories and alternatives.

3. More Options makes better selection: If customers are able to view multiple options, it makes their choice selection easy. Also it increases their trust, confidence and pleasure browsing your site. It would push them to visit your site again and refer it to others.

4. Increase Sales Volume: By using these compelling tools such as better guidance to customers, in-depth view of your store products, enhanced customers’ experience will most definitely increase your sales volume.

There is another compelling approach that is used by eCommerce stores known as “Who Bought This Also Bought” meaning for example, customers who bought product A also bought product b. These product suggestions are kind of more emotional and compelling to customers that make their mind start thinking about them and probably the thing you would want. The rest of the things depends on how well you have selected and presented these products.  

Suggestions related to items such as ”Who Bought This Also Bought” eliminates most of the problems associated with cross sells such as showing unrelated products randomly, ruining the conversion by showing competing products on cart page etc. To give you an example, suppose you show different suggestions on home page and different ones on cart page. A customer adds a product in the cart and then jumps to the product detail page where he finds totally different suggestions. This may confuse him totally.

In cross sells, related items to the product have to be carefully taken and presented on product or home page. With the “Who Bought This Also Bought” approach, customers shopping trends are measured and suggestions are made accordingly. For example, if any customer purchases a charming shirt and a tie and then another customer comes to your site and looks for a beautiful tie. If he gets inspired by ‘tie’ which previous customer purchased and clicks on it to find more details and see more charming images. Once he is on product detail page he will be presented with tea shirt as a suggested product because “customers who bought tea shirt also bought a tie.”

The appearance of these products depends upon your page layout, but mostly they come at the right or left of your page or at the bottom. If you are using any ecommerce platform such as Magento, you will find this functionality in the form of Magento Extensions. These are not too much costly and they provide wonderful benefits to your online store.