3 Mistakes You’re Doing With Upsells That Hurt Your Online Store Sales

Upsells are a great way to increase your online store’s profit, but if done the wrong way it can have the opposite effect!

Instead of making you more profit, upsells can bring confusion and drive your customers away from your store…

So before you set up a new upsell on your store, here are the 3 mistakes you’re doing with upsells that hurt your dropshipping store sales.

Make sure to read the whole article because I don’t only explain what to do, but how to fix it and get your upsells to actually work!

Enjoy.

First of All, What Is An Upsell?

An Upsell, as the name implies, is an offer to purchase and additional item on top of what you’re already selling.

It can be anything you like, a physical item or a service, and it’s sole purpose is to make an additional profit for your business.

You can choose to offer an upsell in the product page(next to the product you’re promoting), or in the later stages like in the cart page right before the customer proceeds to checkout.

In some cases, the upsell comes right after the purchase has been already completed – This is called a post-purchase upsell.

A post-purchase upsell is probably one of the most efficient ways to get extra income because it happens right after the customer has finished his order.

The customer is already warmed up, happy with his purchase, and there’s no need to enter the payment and shipping details again to buy the offered upsell.

So with a single click of a button, the customer can purchase an extra item from your store and make you more money.

Sometimes having a working upsell on your store can be the difference between a marketing campaign that makes you profit or one that only loses you money.

So make sure to check out these 3 mistakes done by Dropshippers and learn how upsells should really be done!

1. Offering Random Products As Upsells

This is probably the most common mistakes newbie Dropshippers do when offering upsells with the products they currently promote.

If you think about it in a simple way, why shouldn’t you offer more products to buy? If a customer doesn’t want any of the upsells then he can simply proceed to the checkout and buy the main product.

So no harm done, right? Well that doesn’t really work that way…

The problem with people is that we’re a SUPER curious species and we like to explore and look at shiny stuff. So if something cool is presented, then there’s a big chance we will go out of our ways to check it out.

And in this case, the exploration will be the random products you just offered. So instead of proceeding to the checkout page, you’ll have a bunch of customers who are going to click on that random shiny product and see what it is all about.

This is BAD for your business because you’re:

1. Delaying your customers from going forward with their purchase, thus making the purchase process much slower than it needs to be.
2. “Confusing” your customers with random products and making them lose focus from the main product you’re currently selling.

In both cases, you’re risking of losing your customers in the process and losing valuable sales. And this is something your really don’t want to happen, especially when getting customers isn’t getting easier by the day.

So if you’re already offering upsells, make sure they have a connection to the main product you’re promoting. You’ll increase your chances of making additional profit and you don’t have to worry about your customers wondering around to different places.

2. Offering Too Complicated Products As Upsells

Sometimes an upsell, even if it has a clear connection to the main product you’re selling, can be a bit too complicated for your customers and possibly drive them away from your store.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re selling the calming pet bed which is a winning product that made a lot of Dropshippers some really good profit over the years.

With the right marketing campaign, nothing stops this pet bed from doing crazy sales this Q4 again. So if you were to pick up this product and sell it on your store, then adding an upsell to increase your AOV is a logical thing to do.

Now a good upsell I could think of for this product would be this cat hair brush:

It’s a great complementary product to go with the calming pet bed. It is self explanatory and even if a customer decides to check it out, it will take him less than 10 seconds to fully understand what it is all about.

So with this product as my upsell, I can expect almost no issues at all and there’s a good chance a bug chunk of my customers will end up taking this brush together with the pet bed(if the deal is actually tempting).

But imagine a scenario where instead this simple pet hair brush, I would’ve offered this product:

This automatic cat feeder that looks complicated and even has an app to operate.

This can be a great product to sell as your main product, but offering it as an upsell requires A LOT of reading for your customers to fully understand if they really want it or not.

So now your customers are going to be clicking on this product and reading through it, which will eventually prolong the time till they reach the checkout.

And this is the best case scenario – The worst case scenario is your customers checking out this product and simply moving on from your store back to browsing Facebook or TikTok.

So think well before adding products which are too complicated as your upsells.

3. Just Offering An Upsell

No matter how good the upsell can be, it eventually prolongs the buying process for each customer. Especially when the upsell is in the product/cart page, where the customer still didn’t complete his order.

So depending on the product you’re currently selling, sometimes it’s even better to leave it clean and just roll without any additional upsells.

The best example to that would be a one-product store where the everything revolves around a single product, and you don’t actually need an upsell to make it work.

On the contrary, an upsell in some cases(no matter how good it is) may ruin the “vibe” of your one-product store and get you less sales.

In these cases, it’s better to focus entirely on the product you’re actively promoting and making single/multiple sales of the same product.

After that, you can devise a plan and remarket new products to your already existing customers – Get those extra risk-free sales using email marketing ?

To Sum It Up

Upsells are a great way to increase your AOV and get more profit into your business, but you can’t just add some random product and expect sales to magically increase.

You have to be extra careful when adding products as upsells and make devise the right strategy for it to affect your dropshipping business the right way.

If you have questions, feel free to ask me in the comments.

Good Luck!

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