Cross-Selling for the Holidays

Our “gift” of holiday advice may help you increase your sales

You may have heard once or twice that the holidays are the season of giving, but given the current market, you should probably rely a little less on consumers’ giving spirit and a little more on tactics that can give you an edge. Which is why — in the spirit of giving, of course — we wanted to share some cross-selling tips from Laurie Briggs of Yahoo! Small Business that any of our online retailers should be able to use.

Below you’ll see some of Laurie’s advice. For all of it, read the full article on the Yahoo! Store Blog. And watch this blog for a series of articles about beefing up your search marketing for the holidays.

Add-ons

If you sell products that require batteries or other accessories, add them as a cart cross-sell for those products. This way, once someone has made that first step towards purchasing, you can offer them a product that they’re going to need anyway — and they might as well buy it from you! In the case of batteries, even if they don’t need them for something they bought at your site, it may remind them that they didn’t buy batteries for a previous purchase at another store and baddabing! — you’ve just increased your order size by several dollars.

Product pairs

Last Christmas, it seemed like every kid who wanted a Hannah Montana doll also asked for a High School Musical doll (my four nieces with the same gift request has got to be a pattern!) but auto-suggestions can’t predict what new items will be hot together this year. For your newest items, go to a brick and mortar store and see how they are merchandising. Also, keep an eye on your first few orders — they will help you determine some dependable cross-sells that you can set up using cross-sell rules. Once your sales of these items are on a roll, you can opt to auto-suggest only.

Unique products

During the holidays, shoppers are looking for a range of gifts for a range of people. Shoppers also tend to be much more open to suggestions, unlike other times of the year when they tend to focus on a particular purchase. Think about it — how many relatives do you have to buy for? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get shopping done for multiple people at just one store? And for how many of them do you have no clue what to get? Shoppers are intent to buy, but not necessarily intent to buy one particular item, and the suggestions you give can be quite welcome to a shopper in a gift-giving conundrum.

— The Team