Up Sells, Cross Sells & Related Products, What’s The Difference?

Product relationships in Magento is a tool that is often overlooked by online retailers and is a very effective way of increasing your average order value or AOV. A lot of clients I speak to about this often get confused between the different types of product relationship and how they should best be used so I thought I’d put together a little guide out there for all you online retailers out there that need some guidance. Happy reading…

Up Sell Products In Magento

Up sell products or up sells in Magento are essentially upgrades or a more expensive alternative of a given product. By default, they appear underneath the product description on all product pages where the product has up sell products assigned to it.

Online retailers should be tactical with their choice of ups sells and ultimately try to up sell the user where possible. An example I like to give my Magento clients is if you went to a car showroom would you get the car salesman trying to sell you the cheaper model of a car? The same concept should be applied to your Magento website if you are looking to increase that AOV. Users will always want the biggest and best version of a product as long as their budget can allow it so take advantage of this behaviour and ensure the choice is there for them.

Related Products In Magento

Related products in Magento are products that can be purchased with any given product. A good example of this is if you are selling clothes. Lets say you are selling a nice long coat as well as hats, scarfs and gloves, amongst other things. Why not relate a hat, scarf and pair of gloves that looks great when worn with the nice long coat? I hope there are light bulbs going off now.

By default Magento implies this to the product page in a not so user friendly model where the user has to check a check box before clicking the add to basket button. Magento will then add both products to the users basket together. In my opinion this solution is confusing for the user and we want to make it as easy as possible. Getting your magento developer to simply remove the check boxes and apply add to basket buttons instead may work better for you. Make sure that you have your store set to redirect back to the product page when a user adds a product to basket though as we don’t want them to leave the page by adding a related product.

Cross Sell Products In Magento

Cross sell products or cross sells in Magento are products that can be purchased with any given product. This often gets confused with related products, however there is one significant difference. Cross sells by default appear on the basket page just before the user hits the checkout. Cross sells are the last opportunity you have to get your users spending more money on your store so choose them wisely.

An example I always use of a cross sell product is if you was purchasing a battery powered toy. With this product you may need to also purchase batteries so would assign these as a cross sell product.

Closing Comments

Product relationships are a very powerful way of encouraging users to spend more money on your online store. If this is something that you would like to do and need a freelance magento 2 developer to help then why not get in touch today?