Up-Selling and Cross-Selling: increase your sales with practical examples

Would you like to implement new marketing strategies? That is exactly what we want: to increase your sales with practical examples of Up-Selling and Cross-Selling.

In previous articles we talked about Visual Merchandising; today it’s the turn of a new way of arranging your products.

Would you like to know what is the best strategy for you?

Let’s start with a quick review!

Up-selling consists of offering your client an improvement on the product that they initially intended to buy, but with features that increase its price. In this way, everyone involved wins: your business, because its turnover rises; your customers, because with a higher quality product, their experience improves.

As for cross-selling, it consists of selling the customer something complementary to the original product that better meets their needs. The consequences are similar to those of up-selling: increase your turnover and improve the customer experience.

So what is the difference?

The difference is this: up-selling, in short, changes a product for a better one; cross-selling changes the original purchase for a larger one, with more products that complement each other.

What will depend on whether you apply one or the other?

Of the characteristics of your assortment. Some products lend themselves more easily to one of the two strategies than others. For them we have included a breakdown of examples below that will make it very clear what we mean by each term.

The main question you should ask yourself is the following: does my product fulfill its purpose of covering a certain need? If the answer is “yes”, the next step is to question to what degree it covers said need, because if it can do better, we will talk about up-selling. If you need complementary attributes, we will apply cross-selling.

Let’s go now with some practical examples of up-selling and cross-selling

We believe that a case study is worth more than a thousand words, so we propose several examples focused on increasing your sales with up-selling and cross-selling so that you can decide what fits best with your stock.

Examples of up-selling

• Offer “the complete package”. If you sell books, offer the complete saga. If your product is cinematographic, offer extras, director’s commentary, sequels, prequels, etc.
• “Go Premium”. Let’s imagine that your product is backpacks. If the base product has three pockets, offer a backpack that has four pockets and two more compartments. Or let’s imagine that your product is basic jeans. The “premium” lot would be other better quality jeans, with more careful seams and a neater style.
• Level up: provide added value that makes your product irresistible, such as home delivery, a gift that goes with it, a discount for future purchases, etc.
• “Size up.” Continuing with the textile sector, let’s suppose that your product is towels. Offer for a larger portion of the price, a larger, thicker towel, with a better pattern, etc. In this way, the user will naturally tend to choose the option that is most worthwhile.

Examples of cross-selling

• “The accessory makes the look”. Arrange your product in such a way that it looks incomplete if no extras are added. The best example is the fashion sector, when an outfit includes a jacket, skirt and shirt, or a suit includes a matching tie, cufflinks or waistcoat.
• Join the “envy” strategy. This is what giants like Amazon do when, in the description of a product, they add “other customers also bought this”. Because if others did it, maybe your client needs it too.
• Guide yourself by aesthetics. If a customer is looking for rose gold bracelets, it is likely that they are interested in some other product, even if it does not initially have much to do with the bracelet, that shares the same material. The same theory can be applied to textures, colors or trends in fashion. The possibilities are endless!

Try to apply any of those examples and you will be on the way to become an expert in up-selling and cross-selling. Tell us what you think of these examples and add some of your own harvest!