Sales Techniques That Work: Up-sell, Cross-sell, Down-sell

In this article, I will introduce you some techniques which will help you to increase your sales and help your business to grow. You have probably heard before for up-sell, cross-sell and down-sell, but do you really know how to use them? No? I will try to explain you shortly in this article.

Up-sell

This is a marketing technique which involves selling more expensive product to a customer, convincing him that he will get bigger/better/extra product for additional small amount of money. The seller should prove to the customer that there is a bigger benefit from getting the bigger product than the smaller one. This is a technique which is used by many companies.


I will give you an example with McDonalds: I suppose that everyone have ever been in McDonalds and ordered a cheeseburger for $2 and after giving additional $1, you are receiving double cheeseburger. You probably accept this offer, because you know that buying just the double cheeseburger costs $4 itself.


If you are owner of an OpenCart store, you can use the module PopupUpsell, which is created mainly for this purpose. You can select which product to be up-selled and how to be presented to the customer. You can increase the amount of sales just by creating custom upsell offers.

Cross-sell

Cross-sell is another marketing practice of suggesting related products to a customer who is about to buy something. If you are ordering food from a restaurant, before the checkout you may be shown a list of beverages that match with your dish. Also, maybe someone else bought the same main course with this salad and you may like the same combination.


In this case, the most suitable module is AlsoBought, which does exactly the same as explained above. It uses intelligent cross-selling algorithm which allows you to recommend products based on the times they were bought together.



Down-sell




Down-sell is another technique which you have to use when a customer is trying to back down from a purchase. This time you have to conform customer’s budget and give him the best (cheaper than suggested before) price for a product/service which has familiar features like the other before that. In this case, you have to offer cheaper product, which has a better chance to be accepted, because selling something is better than nothing.


For example, you are about to buy a house and an agent shows you one which you cannot afford. The agent will certainly give you another options which will cost you less. This is called down-selling.
In conclusion




If you have never used these techniques before, I suggest you to start using them, because you are losing sales and valuable customers. You should show them that there is always a profit from buying from you and that they cannot miss the opportunity of getting better product for a small price.