Growing an ecommerce store isn’t getting any easier. With acquisition costs skyrocketing—up 222% over the last eight years—relying solely on paid ads is becoming less sustainable. Plus, new competitors are entering the market in droves, making it even harder to attract and retain customers.
So how do you cut through the noise and stand out?
One clever strategy is cross-selling your products on other stores.
In simple terms, this means making your products available for sale on complementary ecommerce stores. By partnering with stores that align with your brand or leveraging your own network of stores, you can introduce your products to new customer bases, boosting your visibility and sales—all without spending a cent on ads. Meanwhile, your partner and expansion stores get to effortlessly expand their product offerings. Win-win.
Cross-selling is one of the few low-cost ways to drive fast, meaningful sales in this crowded market. It’s also a key reason why we developed the Syncio plugin—to help WooCommerce stores grow through seamless collaboration.
Of course, like any growth strategy, cross-selling comes with its own challenges. From managing products across stores to finding the right partners, it requires the right tools and approach to work. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to efficiently cross-sell your WooCommerce products across stores.
Cross-Selling Products On Other Stores: 3 Easy Ways
Let’s dive into three easy and efficient methods for sharing products across stores, whether you’re cross-selling with partners or between your own stores.
Using the Syncio Plugin
The Syncio plugin makes cross-selling your products across WooCommerce and Shopify stores incredibly easy—with just one click.
With Syncio, you can automatically share your products with other WooCommerce stores, including all relevant details such as images, descriptions, tags, and more. What sets Syncio apart is its real-time stock syncing feature, which ensures that inventory levels are always up-to-date for your products across all connected stores, preventing overselling or stock shortages.
As a result, you’ll save time and reduce the risk of human error, especially as you scale your cross-selling. Syncio’s automation gives you the peace of mind to focus on growth, not manual updates. For a more in-depth look, here’s a detailed guide on how to get started with the plugin.
If you’re looking to cross-sell across your own stores: Syncio works with multi-stores that share a single WP installation, as well as standalone WooCommerce stores with separate installations. If you have a multi-store setup, you’ll just need to ensure that each store has its own subdomain.
Manual Import/Export
For smaller-scale cross-selling, WooCommerce offers built-in tools that allow for manual import and export of product data. The process is simple: export product data as a CSV file, and your partner store can then import that data into their system. This can be a straightforward solution for occasional cross-selling between stores.
However, over time, these manual processes can become time-consuming and prone to errors. You may need to frequently update product data, adjust stock levels, or make changes across multiple stores, which is difficult to manage manually.
Using Product Importer Plugins
You can also choose to use a bulk product import plugin like Product Import Export for WooCommerce. This will automate a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to sharing products across your partner stores, however, it won’t sync stock levels so you’ll still have to manage inventory manually with this method.
Best Practices for Cross-Selling With Partner Stores
To get the most out of cross-selling partnerships, it’s best to collaborate with stores that align with your products and customer base. Stores offering complementary products create a more seamless shopping experience for customers and add value to both parties. For example, if you sell artisanal candles, teaming up with a store specializing in handmade home decor would make a natural fit. Customers who are interested in one product are likely to be interested in the other, creating a natural fit.
It’s also important to ensure that your brand values are in sync. For instance, if sustainability is core to your brand, partnering with stores that also prioritize environmentally friendly practices will help maintain the trust you’ve built with your customers. A mismatch in values or service standards can confuse or alienate customers.
Key Questions to Discuss With Potential Partners
Before formalizing a partnership, it’s best to have an open discussion around the following topics:
- Revenue-sharing models: How will you split the profits? Will you agree on a commission structure or a fixed fee for every product sold on the partner’s store?
- Inventory management: Who will manage inventory, and how will you ensure stock levels are accurate to avoid overselling?
- Marketing expectations: Will you co-market products? If so, what channels will you use, and who will handle each aspect of the marketing campaign?
- Collaboration terms: How long will the collaboration last, and what are the terms for either party to exit the partnership?
How to Find Partner Stores
It can be helpful to research where your competitors are cross-selling their products. There’s a good chance those stores would be open to collaborating with you as well.
You can also leverage the Syncio Marketplace, which is a built-in feature of the Syncio app and plugin. It’s an easy way to find like-minded partners, allowing you to connect with over 1,000 quality WooCommerce and Shopify stores that are open to cross-selling and collaborating.
Best Practices for Cross-Selling Across Your Own Stores
Just as with external partnerships, it’s important to ensure that the products you’re cross-selling between your own stores are aligned with each store’s audience and market. Take the time to assess which products would appeal to customers in each store, and adjust product selections accordingly. A targeted approach to cross-selling will help you offer relevant items without overwhelming your stores with unnecessary products.
How to Optimize Your Multi-Store Product Strategy
If you manage multiple stores catering to different regions or niches, cross-selling between them allows you to test new markets and expand the reach of your successful products. For example, you can use your U.S. store to offer products that are popular in your U.K. store.
Using a multi-store analytics tool like Metorik or Polar Analytics can also help with refining your cross-selling strategy. You can use these to track which products perform well across stores and analyze sales data to identify where cross-selling is delivering the best results. This feedback can guide you in scaling the most successful products across your network of stores.
How to Cross-Sell Across Different Markets
If each of your stores serve different markets, it’s essential to maintain each distinct brand when cross-selling. That means carefully adapting products to fit the specific demands of each store’s audience.
If you’re cross-selling with Syncio, you can easily adjust product attributes like pricing, images and tags and more while still keeping stock levels synced, giving you the flexibility to tailor your offerings.
Managing and Scaling Cross-Selling
Without the right processes in place, handling multiple stores, partners, orders, and inventory updates can quickly get out of hand. Here are some things to keep in mind as you tackle cross-selling:
Syncing Inventory to Avoid Overselling
One of the biggest challenges of cross-selling—whether you’re partnering with other stores or managing multiple stores yourself—is ensuring that inventory is accurately synced across all platforms. If a product sells out on one store but remains listed as available on another, you risk overselling, leading to delayed shipments, frustrated customers, and potential damage to your brand’s reputation.
As we mentioned, the Syncio plugin can be an effective way to automate this entirely, ensuring that stock levels are consistent across all stores.
Co-Marketing Opportunities
One of the biggest advantages of cross-selling is the opportunity to co-market products. When done right, joint marketing efforts can exponentially increase your reach, especially when each partner promotes the collaboration through their email lists, social media channels, or even offering exclusive discounts.
Creating bundles featuring complementary products, launching co-branded products or providing discounts to each store’s customers are just a few ways to maximize the potential of cross-selling.
For Cross-Selling With Partner Stores: Maintaining Consistent Communication
Scheduling regular check-ins with your partner stores can help ensure that you’re both on the same page, whether you’re coordinating joint promotions or addressing operational challenges.
Using tools like Slack or shared calendars can streamline communication and keep both teams on the same page. This helps coordinate marketing efforts, address potential supply chain issues, and stay organized when managing day-to-day operations. The more transparent your communication, the smoother your partnership will be.
Wrapping Up
Exploring cross-selling could be the key to unlocking the next phase of growth for your WooCommerce store. Whether you’re partnering with complementary businesses or managing multiple stores of your own, cross-selling allows you to reach new customers and expand your market presence.
By automating product sharing and inventory syncing with tools like Syncio, you can reap all the rewards of cross-selling without increasing your workload or marketing budget.
