Recently we got a question from one of our readers about automating the process of selecting and selling cross-sell products on Magento product pages. We can see where this question is coming from, knowing that selecting cross-sell products for each product in your store can cost you a lot of time that could be spent elsewhere. If you are constantly adding new products to your ecommerce store, you also constantly have to add or update cross-sell products to those product pages. This takes about 30 seconds per product, but multiply that by a few hundred products which are constantly in rotation and you can see how much time this can take up in total.
Most of you would say well why don’t you install a Magento plugin that adds random products to your cross-sell and up-sell sections from the same category as the main product? While that partially does the job, it just doesn’t take the maximum advantage of the up-sell and cross-sell space your website uses. If customers see unrelated products in the cross-sell section of a product that they do like, they most certainly aren’t going to make the cross-sell purchase. Optimizing this cross-sell and up-sell space can yield in a few more percentage points on your conversion rate.
Luckily, there are ways for you to automate the process of adding relevant and accurate cross-sell and up-sell products to your product pages without any manual action from your side. This can be done through the Customers Also Viewed extension by Amasty. This extension fills your up-sell and cross-sell products through so called ‘user generated content’. The extension records which combination of products are visited the most by customers, and then checks which combinations yield the most sales.
The concept of the plugin is really simple. Say you sell calculators in your ecommerce store. The customer has decided to buy a calculator from you, and now needs a pair of batteries to go with it. They use the search box in your online store and search for a pair of batteries that fit in that specific calculator. They add both the calculator and the batteries to their shopping cart and proceed to checkout. The Customers Also Viewed extension by Amasty registers this, and places the batteries in the up and cross-sell section of the calculator, and vice versa for the batteries.
The extension keeps track of the most purchased combinations and therefore ‘learns’ in its own way what the best up and cross-sell product combinations are for a specific product, all through the action of your customers. It’s basically a fool proof system: you don’t have to do any of the work, and the customer fills your up and cross-sell section with relevant and accurate related products.
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