Up-sells Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: How to Automate Upsells and Discounts?

We all want to grow our WooCommerce store sales but creating offers for thousands of products is a nightmare.

What if I said you can grow sales on autopilot and without pouring sweat and money into your business?

This post covers how you can set up automated WooCommerce upsells, discounts, order bumps and other offers – so that you can focus on other aspects of your business while your website does its magic.

Select from ready-made offers, run them on your sites, count your sales, relax.

Without further delays, let’s get started.

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.

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.

WooCommerce: Display Product Up-sells @ Thank You Page

One of the most important WooCommerce pages, conversion-wise, is the Thank You page. That’s your chance to offer something special to a user that has just turned into a customer and is therefore more likely to purchase again.

We’ve seen how to include a whole WordPress page inside the Thank You page, how to redirect customers to a different Thank You page URL, how to display a custom social media share box on the Thank You page, but in this article I want to expand a little more on the topic and show a list of purchasable products via a shortcode.

The thing is that the Thank You page “does not exist” inside the WordPress pages, so you can’t just add a shortcode in a page. We must do that via a PHP action hook and the do_shortcode() WordPress function. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Upsell Area @ Checkout Page

If you want to increase your AOV (Average Order Value), you can definitely start from the WooCommerce Checkout page.

A client asked me to place a “Donation Area” close to the “Place Order” button (so at the bottom of the page, once customers are ready to pay) to drive more awareness around this add-on. All I had to do was creating hidden products with a donation value, use my own “Custom Add to Cart URL” guide to create add to cart links and print an HTML box right above the checkout button by using my WooCommerce Visual Hook Guide for the Checkout Page. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Move & Customize Upsells @ Single Product

Keeping WooCommerce upsells at the very bottom of the single product page it’s kinda boring. In my view, WooCommerce users want to know there are upsells even before they scroll down (you also might want that: upsell means more profit). Amazon does that too.

In this tutorial, we will see not only how to move them to the top, right below the Add to Cart, but also how to customize the upsells output to show just 2 columns and remove default WooCommerce “loop” elements such as the Add to Cart. Enjoy!

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 segmenting: https://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? 🙂

WooCommerce: Translate “You may also like…” Text

Apparently, since WooCommerce 4.1, there is now an easy way to edit the “You may also like…” WooCommerce string thanks to a brand new “PHP filter”. Kudos to Damien Carbery for reporting this new method.

So, as usual, simply copy/paste the snippet below in your child theme’s functions.php and it will do what it says on the tin. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Change # of Upsells and Move Them Above Tabs

If you use a full page width on your product page you might want to change the number of upsells to 3 (or multiple). Also, a client of mine needed the upsells to be above the tabs, so there you go. Continue reading WooCommerce: Change # of Upsells and Move Them Above Tabs

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