Building sales volume with Recommended Products

Are you looking for your customers to buy more from your online store? Recommended Products is essentially a form of suggestive selling and can help you grow the average order value of any given transaction, hence, increasing your overall sales. This technique of selling is also known as add-on selling.

But first, how do you suggest a recommended product?

Let’s start with an online customer who might be shopping for a new pillow and finds one that she likes selling for $20. A good idea for a recommended add on item would be a pillow protector, which sells for $5, as it protects and extends the life of the pillow. The customer likes the recommendation and proceeds to checkout with both the pillow and the pillow protector, even though they were originally planning to just buy the pillow.

This can be repeated over and over again with not only one product but many other products on your site as well, further increasing the opportunity to add more sales dollars. And note that the recommended product is often times a lesser value than the main purchase, making it even easier for the customer to add on that increment of one item.

How easy it can be to increase your sales

This example illustrates how a very small effort will convert would have been one $20 transaction and turning it into a $25 transaction, a 20% increase in sales. This is because getting the customer to initiate a purchase is often seen as the most difficult part of the transaction. After the customer is committed to a purchase, an additional sale of an item that is a fraction of the original purchase is much more likely.

Other examples

Suggestive selling can take on many forms depending on the business category. On a clothing site, one could suggest accessories to accompany a piece of apparel, such as a scarf and gloves to go with a new coat. A restaurant site, could display side dishes to complement the main course a customer might order. Similarly, on a garage door parts sites, for customers ordering a replacement roller, a suggested item could be a replacement hinge to go with it.

How can I make this work for my business?

Let eComchain do the behind the scenes work for you. Increase your add on sales with the help of a recommendation engine which utilizes algorithms to determine the best recommendations. At eComchain, we use these engines along with Machine Learning and Data Science models These look at historical search from the past 6 to 8 months along with recently viewed items and order history. And the models are continuously learning based on various actions performed by your customers online.

This is what helps to create those add on sales. Back to our original example: previous customers bought a new pillow and decide to add on a pillow protector. When this happens over and over again, our eComchain solution will position pillow protectors on the pillow page as a recommended product, as shown below.