WooCommerce: Get Product / Order Cross-Sells

Getting the list of cross-sells for a WooCommerce product is actually super easy (yes, it’s one line of PHP). But what if you need to “calculate” the list of cross-sells for an entire order, made of different products?

In this short tutorial for developers we’ll see both: how to get the cross-sell IDs for a product, and how to get the entire range of cross-sells based on what’s been purchased in a given order. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: 4 Ways to Grow Your Sales With Omni-Channel Marketing

The goal of marketing automation is to help you save on effort. However, sometimes it comes at the price of poorly targeted campaigns and half-baked marketing content, which can be outright damaging to your business.

The other problem with most of WooCommerce marketing automation tools is that they have a one-off approach to marketing that aims to get as much as possible from one user interaction – during checkout, for example – without providing for loyalty or retention. This goes against the golden rule of marketing, where your biggest asset is your leads and customers and your biggest mission is to retain them.

The solution is to use a omni-channel marketing approach, where a central tool collects and enriches user behavior and history in a unified profile and then uses that profile to deliver relevant campaigns across all user touchpoints. 

This ensures more harmonized marketing, a seamless experience for your users and eventually more trust and engagement with your brand. These are all the ingredients you need to increase the loyalty lifetime value of your users and customers. 

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WooCommerce: Winning With a Cross-Sell Strategy

If you’ve experienced the difficulty and high cost of acquiring new customers, you’re not alone. The estimated probability of selling to a new prospect is only five to 20 percent. Compare that to the probability of selling to an existing customer: 60 to 70 percent.

That’s not all. Depending on your business and your industry, it can be five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one you already have. That’s despite all your pre-sales preparation.

As you can see, retaining your existing customers – or those who show an intent to buy – is paramount. How to increase revenue from them, however, continues to elude many businesses.

Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be hard. With the help of WooCommerce, you can easily create personalized recommendations to attract more sales from customers who are already interested in your offerings.

Using customized recommendations works to your advantage as internet users have grown fond of personalization. In fact, ninety percent of customers find personalization of their shopping journey appealing, and 71 percent feel at least some frustration when the experience is totally impersonal.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at cross-selling and its benefits. We’ll also show you how you can create an effective strategy for your online store, using the WooCommerce Added to Cart trigger in MailOptin. Let’s get started!

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WooCommerce: Sell More With Upsell & Order Bump Plugins

You’ve certainly heard of upsells and order bumps before, but somehow everyone seems to have their own definitions for these terms, the product makers on this list being no exception. The WooCommerce plugin further confuses things by inexplicably categorizing recommendations made on the product page as upsells and recommendations made on the cart page as cross-sells. Therefore, we need to get our terminology straight. 

First of all, we’re talking about product recommendations here, but not the type that simply appears on product and cart pages regardless of whether the shopper has put anything into their cart (we have covered those already). That type of product recommendation plugin often goes by the name of “Related Products for WooCommerce.” It is a crude instrument that gets the job done but is not as finely attuned as the tools in this listicle. 

Keep that in mind: the product recommendations we are discussing here, whether they are upsells, cross-sells, or downsells, are happening during checkout (before you finish your order) or post-checkout (after you finish your order). Upsells are typically defined as attempts to sell a more expensive product than that which has been purchased or is in the cart. Downsells are defined as attempts to sell a less expensive product. Cross-sells are defined as attempts to sell an equal-priced product. 

Sometimes, people specify whether they are talking about recommendations during the checkout or post-checkout process by using the term “post-purchase upsell/downsell/cross-sell.”

Others, like Chris Lema — who has recently established himself as an authority in this domain — refer to order bumps as upsells/downsells/cross-sells that happen during the checkout process and upsells as any type of purchase (no matter the price) that happens during the post-checkout process. This is very common. People use the term upsell to refer to downsells and cross-sells all the time. Unless otherwise stated, we will operate with the definitions set forth in this paragraph. 

So, now that we’re clear on our terms, we can begin discussing the top upsell and order bump products available for WooCommerce. 

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WooCommerce: Top Product Recommendation Plugins

If you’re running an ecommerce site and haven’t spent any time thinking about the product recommendation experience your customers are having, then it’s incumbent on you to start doing so immediately.

Just think where Amazon would be without its robust recommendation engine. Certainly not where it is today.

You might not be able to make recommendations as precise as those of Amazon (that’s almost a certainty when you lack access to the mountains of data Amazon is harvesting to make ever-relevant suggestions), but you might as well work with what you have.

What you have, after all, as a merchant using the WooCommerce platform, is the fruits of countless hours of labor spent on all manner of tools and plugins, including those focused on (no surprise!) product recommendations. 

Product recommendations can come in many forms. There is upselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is more expensive than that being purchased; there is downselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is cheaper than that being purchased; and there is cross-selling, which involves attempting to sell a product around the same price as that being purchased.

Upsells, downsells, and cross-sells typically take place during the checkout or post-checkout process. It is assumed that one or more items are already in the cart by the time the product recommendation is made. To be sure, there are many plugins that perform this sort of function, most famously CartFlows. However, in this blogpost, we are not so concerned with these kinds of product recommendation tools. Instead, we will focus our attention on those plugins that let merchants make recommendations on product and cart pages, regardless of whether the shopper has loaded the cart with anything. 

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WooCommerce: How to Improve Product Search

Personalized search and product navigation have a dramatic impact on ecommerce sales conversions, and for that reason alone, you should include them in your WooCommerce website build.

But how do you improve the standard search function model included with WooCommerce?

Well, reducing search times and quickly matching your customers to products are two great examples of how you can enhance the customer experience and the value of your brand.

Upgrading the WooCommerce product search function with an AI powered search engine is an easy way to dramatically improve your sales conversion rate; a quick win/win.

This article will explain how to upgrade the basic WooCommerce search and provide a genuinely interactive search experience for your website shoppers. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Boost Your Sales With Advanced Analytics

Product recommendations is an efficient and proven way to boost your WooCommerce sales.

The downside is that it could be a very time-consuming activity to bundle products manually, as well as the fact that it is not always the logical “pairing” that will generate the most sales.

The way forward is to utilize AI (Artificial Intelligence) and let analytical data models do the work for you.

Meet Engage, an AI-powered product recommendation engine. The type of recommendation vary a bit depending on the page your visitor is viewing. This is mainly because the recommendation model needs input to function properly (e.g. the first time a new visitor lands on your homepage, the model doesn’t know anything about their behavior and therefore it can’t provide recommendations.

But as the user interacts with the website the model picks up on behavioral patterns and is then able to provide better recommendations.

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WooCommerce: How to Increase Average Order Value?

AOV a.k.a. Average Order Value is one of the most important ecommerce metrics. It describes the average order total in a given period of time. If this year your WooCommerce website converted 150 orders and made $30,000 in revenue, your AOV for this year is $30,000/150 = $200 (i.e. on average, you can expect each order to be $200).

FYI, the meaning of AOV is the same for any ecommerce platform, but in this article we’ll talk just about WooCommerce. In our opinion WooCommerce is a better, more cost-effective solution than Shopify or other counterparts.

If you don’t know what your WooCommerce store AOV is, immediately go to WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Reports > Orders > Sales by Date > Year and divide “net sales in this period” by the number of “orders placed”. But be careful – those reports are sometimes not correct (I know WooCommerce is working on this at the moment). Mine is giving me AOV = €2… and I know that’s not right.

Your best bet is your Google Analytics account (as long as you’re using the official WooCommerce – Google Analytics integration) and/or your Metorik reports (here’s an article you should read if you need to know how to install reliable WooCommerce tracking, reporting, filtering and segmentinghttps://businessbloomer.com/advanced-woocommerce-tracking-analytics-reports-exports-segmentation/). My Metorik dashboard tells me my WooCommerce website AOV for this year is €233 so far – I can trust this one for sure.

So the question is: how can we get our WooCommerce customers to spend more? Well, here’s a list of WooCommerce plugin alternatives you can install right now to boost your AOV.

In fairness, who wouldn’t want some extra revenue? 🙂

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