Effective Selling For Your Webshop

Selling Like Humans on E-Commerce

In today’s unpredictable economy, businesses are scrambling to reach their sales targets. We all want more business but not at our expense. This is especially true for e-Commerce businesses because even with the millions of potential online shopping patrons, it’s becoming difficult to get business from them.

The main question is: How do we get more sales?

There are 3 ways to do this (though they are easier said than done).

Here are the methods:

1. Attract new customers. When you attract new customers, you attract new business.
2. Aim for repeat business. Encourage your existing customers to come back and buy more.
3. Increase the average order size. We can do this by cross-selling and upselling.

For online retailers, this is important because we don’t have a sales person making suggestions every step of the way or anticipating customer’s needs. Our webshop needs to do this for us. So how do we incorporate this human selling element to our online webshops?

Technology is not quite at the level where it can take the place of intuition and the human touch. However, it is making huge strides, especially with cross-selling and upselling abilities in e-Commerce. Yes, it helps your business by selling more products, but it makes your customers happy as well.

Employing these proven sales techniques will increase customer retention and loyalty and revenue growth, but if we did these processes manually on our e-Commerce platform, a lot could go wrong. There could be too much of a price difference in the products you’re showing, or you could be showing things that don’t quite go together all of the time. Choosing the wrong items can mean you miss out on lots of sales. And then there are the technical errors you could be making, because after all, we’re all human.

Ideally, we want to sell our products on the website to our customers like we would in person. We want to make suggestions, ask questions, anticipate their needs. We want to remember them the next time they come and make suggestions based on the last time we saw them.

Cross-Selling

The concept of cross-selling is to offer complimentary or related products. For example, I am shopping online for makeup. I look up foundation. Then I see concealers, foundation primers, and finishing powders. These are products that are often purchased concurrent with the foundation I see. What happens is that I’m sold on the effect of perfect-looking skin instead.

Another example is shopping for a laptop. I find a suitable laptop for my needs on the site, but when I’m shown recommended products, it sparks my curiosity. Wireless mouse, travel bag, external hard-drive, printers, and other related accessories are brought to my attention. I’m now thinking about the possibilities these accessories bring me. This is an investment I want to look further into; I want to get my money’s worth!

Cross-selling shows the products that go perfectly with the item I’m looking at. Even if I didn’t choose one of the products shown to me, the idea is suddenly implanted in my head that maybe I should look for these other products as well. Now I’m spending more and more time on the website doing my research and seeing what other products are available.

These are just some examples of cross-selling, but it can be applicable to a number of businesses. We may not always be aware of what it is exactly that we want until we see it, or until the idea is brought up. We never really know until we are asked. Even if it never occurred to us before, we are suddenly forced to make a decision – are we interested? Is it going in our basket? Or hey, that reminds me, I need this as well? Or thanks but no thanks?

Amazon has long been using cross-selling as a means to increase average order size. Their mentality is “If you buy product A, you might also like products B and C.” Even if you don’t get it, you are now aware of the product.

Upselling

Upselling involves offering customers an upgraded or premium version of a product. A technique often used with upselling is to offer something like a discount or free shipping when the order reaches a particular total, encouraging customers to buy more. If their order is just shy of that magic number that means free shipping, they just might be hunting for another product just to make it. Be sure to do the math – we don’t want to offer free shipping and have it make no impact on our bottom line.

We can also implement upselling by getting them to buy the bigger size of the product. It could be of better value because the customer is actually getting more for less.

What are other ways we can get those sales up?

Impulse buys, presented at the point of purchase, can add up. Show products that go together and make sense, or even products that aren’t directly related but historically show that customers actually do buy the two together. This information can be found from sales research and be implemented in a smart sales strategy.

Personalize the upsell or cross-sell with subtle tricks. It could be as simple as using “You” instead of “We”. This gets them to that frame of mind where they want to satisfy themselves. Adopting a tone of urgency by using words like “need” and “limited time” can also spur a customer to click “Add to Basket.”

Technology to the Rescue

The easiest way to implement cross-selling and upselling on a webshop is to have an automated process. It takes data from the webshop and feeds it into the ERP system. This is a very simple solution that takes away the stress on workflows. It is an incredibly tedious process to do manually. Automating processes will virtually eliminate redundancy and errors.

Cost-effective and smart, it does the thinking for you. Cross-selling and upselling is based on the historical database of past purchases. This automated process helps retain customers because they see these as helpful suggestions and good personalized recommendations.

Nav-to-Net™ is a thoroughly integrated solution with the intelligence built right into Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV (formerly Navision). You will have the ability to run reports to see what is being bought, which is most popular, what products are bought alongside others. This will help any sales team immensely as they can gather insight based on this data. Your sales team can build a strategy based on this information to sell even more. Another capability of our e-Commerce solution is profile selling. Customers will be shown relevant suggestions upon arrival based on previous visits. This feature “listens” to your customer for you and provides you with valuable data on their shopping habits and behaviour. This is just the beginning to understanding customers; it allows you to take advantage of that and personalize each customer profile.

Because Nav-to-Net™ is so tightly integrated, this insight can be used to populate sales campaign data right in Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV, that gets synchronized to the webshop. This e-Commerce solution effectively, automatically, and dynamically cross-sells and upsells on the front-end based on information from the back-end.

Takeaways

When cross-selling and upselling in your webshop, remember to make the choices relevant. Practice restraint so you don’t annoy customers. Pay attention to where in the buying process and where on your webshop these sales opportunities are located. Automation in your e-Commerce solution makes this job so much easier so you can really focus on customer service. When you have the process down pat and handled for you by your platform, that leaves more room for actually attending to your customer issues and actively be involved, giving them a positive experience.

Discover how you can easily apply these sales techniques to your webshop with our solution.

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