Tips to Upsell Products in WooCommerce

While attracting new customers is a good way to increase revenue, it is a lot easier to make revenue from your existing customers. One way to do that is to upsell at the time of purchase.  

Upselling is a sales technique that persuades customers to purchase a more upgraded, premium, or expensive version of the chosen item or any other add-ons to make a larger sale. E-commerce businesses usually combine upselling and cross-selling (selling complementary or related products to existing customers) techniques to increase the order value and maximize profits. 

The key to increasing ecommerce sales through upselling is to add value to the shopping experience of your customers with the product and add-on recommendations. However, trying to sell additional products without demonstrating their value properly may cause you to lose the sale. Nonetheless, when your recommendations are related to the needs of your customers, they’ll appreciate having options and reward you by making larger purchases.  

Implementing the WooCommerce upselling techniques explained in this post will help you convince your buyers to make bigger purchases, preventing you from losing out on a significant amount of revenue. 

You can use upselling techniques in three steps: 

• Before purchase: Displaying recommendations on the bottom of the product/category page or in the sidebar (or sometimes both) 
• During purchase: Displaying recommendations with pop-ups, in the abandoned cart emails, shopping cart or on the checkout page. 
• After purchase: Using personalized follow-up emails for enticing customers to come back and make more purchases. 

1. Create a WooCommerce upsell bundle (before purchase) 

Suppose you sell laptops. A customer who has been looking at your product(s) for some time finally decides on a model and is ready to make the purchase. At this point, think of the things your customer would need to make the most of their purchase. 

In this case, you could offer them a fully-equipped laptop bundle including a mouse, headphones and other accessories. These are the things customers may consider purchasing some time later, but if you offer them at the right moment, you have a great chance to convince them to buy the bundle. 

In this example, you are offering both a cross-sell and an upsell. Your fully equipped laptop bundle provides an upgrade along with additional products. 

You can use tools like the WPC Product Bundles plugin to create bundles of the existing products and offer them together or separately. To set up a new bundle: 

1. Install and activate the plugin
2. Go to Products > Add New in WordPress
3. You will see a new Smart Bundle tab within the Product data widget, where you can indicate the products that should a part of your bundle.  

However, for the product bundles to work, you should group the items that go hand in hand. Likewise, prefer offering several tiers of bundles, so that the customers have multiple options to choose from. 

2. Add a WooCommerce upsell to the checkout process of your store (during purchase) 

The two most appropriate locations for placing the upsells within your WooCommerce store are – within your product pages and checkout page.  

• When you place upsells within your product pages, customers will see the alternative products before moving to the checkout phase. You can seamlessly add WooCommerce upsells to the product pages with a plugin like Booster for WooCommerce. This plugin adds many other features to your online stores, such as product add-ons and cross-sells.
   
• When you place upsells within the checkout page, you can include offers for alternative or additional products within the checkout process’s first few steps. They sometimes also include special discounts for other products, that are available only to the customers who choose the alternative product during the checkout process. 

To add the WooCommerce upsells to the checkout process, you may consider using plugins like Beeketing for WooCommerce. It enables you to set up ‘last-step upsells’. The idea behind these upsells is to offer incremental discounts to customers who want to add more (or maybe more expensive products) to their orders during checkout. This can be a strong incentive, particularly for low-cost items.  

3. WooCommerce upsell (post-purchase) 

It would be surprising to know that you can hit the users with upsell offers after they’ve made a purchase. To execute this, you will need the email addresses of your customers, meaning, you’ll have to ask them if they are fine with receiving exclusive product offers at some point – either while signing up for an account on your online store or maybe during the checkout process.  

And if they agree to it, you can add them to the email list and send them an occasional marketing newsletter for encouraging them to make more purchases. However, sending upsell emails tend to work the best if you do it right in time, meaning, emailing buyers right after their purchase to let them know about related products, time-sensitive offers and more.  

One of the good things about this approach is that it is a subtler approach as compared to implementing upsells during the time of checkout. With the post-purchase upsells, people get time to think about whether they want to buy upgraded version of the product or need any add-ons, so there is less pressure. To implement this WooCommerce upselling tactic, you will need an email marketing platform that can easily connect with your ecommerce website. For example, Mailchimp enables you to create and share ‘product follow-up’ emails that can include upsells. 

Moreover, you can use such emails to thank customers for making a purchase, gather reviews, offer them coupons for future purchases and more. 

Implement an effective WooCommerce upsell strategy today 

There are several strategies for WooCommerce upsells that you can implement easily, using the right tools. However, your chosen strategy should solve the problem(s) of your customer(s). The better you’re able to solve their problems, the more likely they are to buy from you.  

Upselling in your online store is a fast way of increasing revenue and helping customers find high-value products they will enjoy.