How to cross-sell high margin products via eCommerce sites

If footfall is down at your trade counter, with more of your customers buying from you online, there’s a danger you will miss out on your traditional cross-sale opportunities to shift high margin products. So can you replicate cross-sales online? Our Account Manager, Carl Hillier, provides his 5 top tips...

How to cross-sell online

Traditionally, businesses chose to place high margin products close to tills to encourage shoppers to pick them up and purchase them before going through the check-out. Items such as maintenance sprays and disposable gloves are the kind of products that merchants, retailers and trade counters stocked near the till as high margin impulse buys.

Today, however, due to Covid‐19, more transactions are now taking place online. To ensure they are not missing out on profits from high margin purchases, successful merchants have recognised the need to start cross-selling those very same products through eCommerce sites.

Here are key questions to ask and answer, to ensure your business maintains profitability via cross‐selling online:

1. What are your high margin products?

Being able to report on sales and product history will provide a clear indication of what core products and services sell well along with what complementary products and services can be cross-sold to new and existing customers.

This in‐depth knowledge collected from sales and marketing data will enable cross‐selling with confidence and ease.

Once you have been able to identify these items the next step is to define what the margins are going to return, to determine the optimum price point for each.

2. Where should you display relevant related products? 

Studies show that product pages and my basket pages are the best options, as it is at this stage that customers make quick decisions. So, plan the journey a customer will take from landing on the website to checkout, to identify the optimum place to view and interact with cross‐selling suggestions.

Think about highlighting related and relevant items below the price point that makes a transaction eligible for free shipping.

eCommerce customers that click on product recommendations are 4.5 times more likely to add featured products to their basket, so by keeping the process simple, informative and easy, merchants can increase average order values.

3. What are your customers' buying habits?

Once you have chosen what items to sell, the best price to sell them for and the pages on which to display those items, you need to monitor and report on what’s successful and unsuccessful.

Use tools like Google Analytics to reveal where customers are landing on a website, how long they spend on a page, the most popular products being viewed and at what point customers leave a website, with or without purchasing.

Knowing and tracking a customer's buying habits and behaviours can also be done via an online marketing specialist but Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solutions are a more cost‐effective method for merchants.

4. How are other companies using ERP to cross-sell? 

ERP software gives you the ability to offer quality up-sell and cross-sell suggestions to help you improve your margin.

OGL’s Profit4 ERP is a simple and easy to use integration tool for merchants to work alongside existing IT infrastructure.

With the help of OGL, cutting tools distributor, TBS Oxford, migrated existing business processes onto Profit4’s centralised platform, thereby eliminating the need for excess time spent duplicating tasks or searching for cross-sell information on disparate systems.

The ERP system affords TBS Oxford the necessary tool to increase visibility, gain control and drive the business to the next level. Profit4 has seen TBS Oxford transform its daily operations, achieving unprecedented time and cost savings, during its busiest periods and, being cloud‐based, businesses like TBS Oxford can manage the system from a tablet as no data is stored on‐site.

With Profit4 in place, TBS Oxford was able to achieve its peak period to date, when it turned over 20% against its target, showcasing the benefits of ERP.

5. What else can you do to increase the average order value?

There are a number of other steps to increase average order value:

• Keeping products relevant – having the latest product or version and changing what you recommend according to seasonal trends
• Aftersales – offer a discount code on their next purchase from you in the order confirmation email, or alert those customers to related products and send them links for consideration
• Feedback – speak to customers and find out what they think and what works for them then use this invaluable insight for future planning
• Tenacity – don’t give up. If at first something doesn’t succeed, just keep trying different products until you find the one that everyone wants
• Keep it simple and easy to add cross-sell products to the basket

The ways in which OGL’s eShop can help you cross-sell high margin products

eShop includes a variety of features and customer account functionality that will ensure you can cross-sell easily online.

Upsell product option

Our integrated websites can be set up to display items that your customer might prefer to buy, instead of the product currently viewed, to increase interest and up the value of a customer’s spend.

Promotional Banners

Promotional banners on your homepage, and throughout the website, as well as including ‘related items’ on product pages or a ‘recently bought together’ section will gain attention.

Saved Baskets

Cross-sell products can be set to appear on the basket page, just before the customer begins checkout.