Upselling (or cross-selling) is one of the most effective and yet simple techniques of growing your online business. In fact, Amazon is supposed to be doing up to 35% of its revenues via sales of additional products or services. In other words, if you are not upselling your customers today you are practically leaving money on the table.

To start with upselling on Shopify you need basically a third-party app as it's not a part of the standard platform functionality. There are more than 20 different apps on the market and it's not easy to understand which one is the best one for your business.

Once you have found your right upsell app, the next question is what to actually offer. And that's exactly why we have wrote down this article. To share some of the most effective and proven upsell offerings.

1. Upsell same product with an additional discount if a customer buys 2+

This one is probably the most obvious one. Once your customer is buying any product in your store, just offer him an additional one with an extra discount (typically around 20%). This increases your average order value as many customers will see great value in this offer. Especially if the product is something they are buying regularly (i.e. not a fridge).

The important catch here is to also make sure the Shopify discount is set up correctly as Buy X Get Y. Otherwise, customers may just remove the original product from the cart and keep the discounted one.

2. Cross-sell relevant product

This one is probably the best converting one but also requires either a lot of manual work or app which has some sort of AI to understand your store.

The goal here is to offer a highly relevant product to the one that customer just added to the cart. Think of an electric gadget and batteries, or iPhone and cover case. The problem is the setup, especially if you run a large business you don't want to set up cross-sells one by one manually. Luckily, Shopify has a Product Recommendation API that is able to recommend a relevant product. Some of the upsell apps (for example Candy Rack) are leveraging it so you can just turn on the cross-sell offer and watch the business growing.

3. Cross-sell services

This one is probably the most simple one but you will be surprised how effective it can be. By offering extra services to your customers you can easily boost the average order value.

The most common services we see offered are these: Gift Packaging, First in Line (priority shipping and order handling), Extended Warranty, Premium Support. Also, some of the upsell apps will allow you to create a custom service.

4. Upsell to higher (more expensive) product variant

This one is again a highly converting one but requires advanced app capabilities so the upsell replaces the original product in the cart. Unless this is happening, it can lead to customer's confusion and eventually a drop in conversion as they would have two instead of one product in the cart. And only a few Shopify apps can do that (again, Candy Rack is one of them).

The goal is to offer a "higher" and usually more expensive variant of the same product. For example, when a customer is buying a 128GB iPhone, you will offer a 256GB model. To make the offer even more attractive you can also leverage a discount and say something like "Add only $X more and get twice much storage".

5. Combine but try to keep it simple

Last but not least idea is to combine all or some of the mentioned above. But remember to keep your upsell game simple. Too many upsell or cross-sells may in fact worsen your customer experience and overall conversion.

Based on our experience, we recommend offering up to 3 different upsells at one time. Only one is a missed opportunity and more than three is too overwhelming.

If you do everything right the upsell conversion (or take rate) should be around 5% (measured on the offer views). The overall uplift on your store revenues should be around +10% to +30%. Good luck and happy upselling!