Upsell and Cross Sell use cases?
Steve McIntosh
that although everybody knows what upsell and cross-sell means in
general, everybody has their own specific idea of what's involved.
These techniques are sales tools. The goal is to increase sales or
increase profits by suggesting to customers who are viewing a product
other products which they may wish to purchase instead/as well.
Typically they are used by the marketing people to perform...
* Upselling is when you would like to tempt the customer to purchase a
more profitable product than the one they are currently viewing.
* Cross-Selling is when you would like to suggest other products which
the customer might like to purchase as well as / instead of the
product they're viewing.
Typically the products offered in a cross-sell fall into two categories:
* Related Products are products that are similar to the one being
viewed in some way. The current Spree Taxonomy scheme is perfect for
this and some minor additions to the taxon helper may be all that is
needed to suit most use cases.
* Accessories are products which you want the customer to buy in
addition to the product being viewed. In fact they're often useless
unless the customer owns the product being viewed.
One point that often gets missed in discussing these sales techniques
is that it is often desirable that these associations *NOT* be bi-
directional.
For valid marketing reasons, you may want several products to suggest
a more profitable product as an upsell, but you want to make sure that
that more profitable product does not suggest a less profitable
alternative.
There are also valid marketing reasons to have very tight control over
what points to what. I have seen product managers engage in very
disreputable behavior because they perceived that some association on
the website was cannibalizing their sales by drawing customers away
from their products. This is, of course, not OUR problem but anything
we can do to help our clients avoid such things is worthwhile.
Past these there are the more general sales techniques which might mix
in and impact how we approach the subject...
* Recommendations - offering products which may be of interest to a
customer based on their order history, which products they've looked
at, highest rated similar products and on and on. I think between
google and ebay they've tried everything with questionable success.
So, after this long winded brain dump which I thank you for reading up
to this point, my question to the group is based on your experience
with ecommerce clients, what are the most common and most desired use
cases for upsell/cross-sell scenarios and what would we need to add or
change in Spree to accommodate them?
I'll start.
We already have an obvious use case. Generating a few links to similar
products based on a product's taxons as a short-cut from the product
detail page so that the other products are visible without having to
go up to the breadcrumbs and back down to an index, etc. This should
require no more than an extra method in the taxon helper.
--
Steve McIntosh
stev...@endpoint.com
http://www.endpoint.com