Getting customers to buy higher-end products over the products that they have their minds on is a great way to increase your revenue. It’s also one of the trickier sales strategies to get right since a lot of times you risk coming off as pushy.

That said, this is still a technique that you should adopt if you want to hit it big in ecommerce. It’s also one that you can apply whether you’re selling goods or services. For this, Magento makes product selection and upsell very easy. But there’s more to it than just displaying comparable products (including the higher-end and pricier) if you want to upsell with consistency.

Setting Up Upsell Products on Magento

To start adding products to the upsell list, first go to the Admin Panel. From there you can navigate to the Product page and then the Catalog page.

From the Catalog page, you should see a list of all the available products. Next to each one there should be an Edit button. From the Edit menu, you should see a section called Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells.

Click on the Add Up-Sell Products button. Use a filter to sort out what products you want to promote or simply scroll through the list manually and check the box in front of the products you deem appropriate to upsell. Click the Save button and you’re done.

As you can see, the part where you actually add upsell products couldn’t be simpler. The strategies used in coming up with those products are another story. That’s the part that real magic happens and which you can make or lose money in the process.

Key Upselling Strategies

There are a couple of strategies that you need to be aware of when trying to upsell products in your online store. Magento makes configuring upsells very simple but there are other principals involved if you want to get your customers to actually buy the more expensive products.

First of all, it’s important to understand that not all products should have upsells. Some are simply that good on their own and any alternative or minor upgrade is unlikely to justify the cost and may only serve to turn off the customer.

To appear as transparent as possible, it’s best if you describe all upsell products accordingly and explain why they’re better than the customer’s initial choices. Otherwise, you’re just linking a more expensive product that the customer will have to research on his or her own.

Secondly, if the upsell product doesn’t offer true value, customers won’t buy it. That doesn’t mean that they will also abandon their existing cart. But it’s a possibility if your store page is designed in a way that blatantly pushes customers towards buying more expensive items and for no good reason.

Limit Product Options

If you offer your clients a never-ending supply of products that do the same thing, you can’t control what they’re going to buy. For upsells to be successful, you need to limit the available options.

One trick for doing this right is displaying only best-selling products or the ones with the highest number of reviews. You could also configure your store so that it presents specific high-end products as alternatives whenever customers are browsing your store.

Always Use Customer Analytics

Upselling is a sales strategy. And to develop a good sales strategy, you need to understand what your customers want. This means using data related to previous purchases to promote specific high-end products that would appeal to customers.

To make sure that you get as much information as possible regarding client tendencies and shopping patterns, you want to also implement Checkout Fields Manager. A must-have Magento feature in any online store, this allows you to get more information from your buyers.

Other extensions and plugins are also available and help with the automation process.

Email Marketing Is a Great Tool Still

Never underestimate the power of email marketing when done right. It’s a perfect opportunity to upsell some products and Magento makes personalized email marketing very easy.

The platform allows you to target previous customers or even customers that have abandoned carts and never returned. In those emails, you can promote pricier products that do a better job.

Offering a small discount may also help seal the deal. Needless to say, the new product should ideally still bring a higher profit than the original product after the discount.

Offer Bundles and Upgrades

Upselling is the art of selling alternative, better products or in a more attractive package or configuration. As an example, if you’re selling gaming monitors, you could also display bundles that contain the following:

• Monitor and peripherals
• Monitor and cleaning accessories
• Monitor and extra HDMI cables

The extra products in the bundle are directly related to the monitor and could add value for the buyer. Similar things can be done when selling laptops. You display the laptop on the store but the configuration page allows for a series of upgrades that make the base laptop a better machine.

All of these are common and effective upselling techniques that even the biggest ecommerce platforms use to get more out of their customers. Why are they effective? Because they add value and so customers don’t feel foisted upon if they end up spending more than planned.

Magento Extensions That Help

There are a couple of Magento extensions and plugins that you can use to perfect your upselling strategy.

Featured Products 3

This is an extension that allows you to highlight upsell products with ease. It also allows you to set specific parameters to block the wrong products from appearing on your website and allows you to configure all store pages individually.

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Another important extension for any Magento online store. This is a record-keeping extension that records and tracks previous purchases. At the same time, whenever a buyer looks at a new product, the extension scours the records for complementary products that other customers bought.

It then displays those products as suggestions to the new buyer. It offers automation to the upselling strategy.

Mass Product Linker

This is the extension that you need if you want to offer as many alternatives as possible, such as upsell and cross-sell products.

Mass Product Relater

A similar extension to Mass Product Linker, this will allow you to generate links between products and designate them as upsells, cross-sells, or related products. The two extensions work very well together and come with user-friendly interfaces.

Upselling Pros and Cons

The pros of using an upsell strategy include increasing your revenue, selling more expensive slow-movers, and helping customers find better solutions for their problems while saving them time on browsing store pages.

The cons include the potential to give your store a pushy or expensive vibe, but that’s only if you don’t approach upsells the right way. Not all products need to be linked with upsell products and even then, you don’t have to make the upsells intrusive. If your customer doesn’t feel like he or she has a choice in the matter, your strategy could fail.

Upselling with Magento – Is It Worth It?

Overall, there are more benefits than disadvantages to implementing an upsell sales strategy for some of your goods and services. When done right and taking customer feedback and analytics into account, it could drastically increase your revenue.

It will take some time and effort to configure all your upsell products and how you want them to appear on the store pages. But if you keep in mind that the customer experience matters most, it’s not that difficult. It certainly beats losing out on 10-30% of revenue in opportunity costs, which is the range that upselling strategies are known to secure.