Maximize eCommerce Upsells and Cross Sells with Live Chat

Increasing average order value and margin can be super impactful in eComm. The more you make on an order and overall LTV, the more you can spend on acquisition.

But how can you do that in a way that’s effective while also being a great customer experience? Apps, pop-ups, etc. They’re not super effective, and most are a really poor sales experience for the customer.

We run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for 100+ stores and have been seeing really strong results with a conversational approach to high margin of sales directly within live chat conversations. I thought this would make it a helpful post.

Let’s get into it…

Map Out Upsells by Chat Question Topic

As with any upsell strategy, the first step is to identify what types of upsells fit into what kinds of situations. But rather than mapping this to specific products or cohorts of visitors, you can map potential upsells to specific pain points and questions somebody has.

For example…

1. If someone is concerned about shipping time and you offer rush shipping for an additional fee, then that’s an easy upsell.
2. Or if you sell something like canvas prints or wall art and someone is asking about installation, if you sell a separate install kit, then this would be a super simple upsell (hint: this is a real example, the store makes ~ 30% on their main product, and 100%+ margin on the install kit – significant margin upsell).

You can get really granular with this approach, but the basics is to identify the most common types of questions people ask on chat and then map potential upsells to these topics.

Integrate Upsells in Chat

At this point, you can easily integrate these upsells into live chat conversations.

1. When your team gets questions about specific issues, they can answer the question using the normal approach and then start to integrate the upsell into the conversation.
2. If they’ve done a good job on answering visitors' questions, there will be some rapport built up which will cause them to be much more open to the upsell.

Focus on High Margin Upsells You Can Discount

One way to supercharge this approach is to be strategic with which upsells you offer and focus on high margin ones. That's obvious if you're trying to increase margin, but by focusing in on high margin upsells you can have the chat team also offer a discount which will massively increase the conversion of the upsell in the conversation.

Here’s how: Going back to the product installation example above…

1. If the customer is asking a lot of questions about how to install the product, the agent can walk them through how it works and how easy it is.
2. At the right point in the conversation, if you have a high margin install kit, then you could easily integrate that into the discussion with something like “it’s $19.95, but let me get you a discount code. I think it’ll make things much easier for you.”
3. Then the agent provides the code and the link, and the visitor appreciates being helped a bit more (while the store appreciates the added margin even after the discount).

In short, this is old-school sales and upselling, done through a live chat interface. Pretty basic, but super powerful if you get it right. Plus, you can use the insights from what converts best to better design your automated upsell processes (checkout, email, etc.).

We run 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. A lot of what we focus on is predicting and saving abandons before they leave, but simple approaches like this can also drive a lot more sales too.

Hopefully, this sparks some ideas for you.