When you give purchasing suggestions for other products to your buyers, either before a sale or after a sale, it’s a cross-promotion. Generally, there two types:

Upsell Use this before a sale to suggest that the prospective buyer buy a bigger, better, and more expensive product in place of the one being purchased (e.g., eBay Store cross-promotion panel at bottom of item listing pages).

Cross-Sell Use this after a sale to suggest additional purchases of accessories, supplementary products, ancillary products, or otherwise related products (e.g., eBay Store cross-promotion panel at bottom of Bid Confirm and Confirmation pages).

With an upsell, you have to be careful that you don’t give buyers the impression that you’re trying to pull some sort of bait-and-switch routine. An upsell is always just a suggestion and nothing more.

A cross-sell is very effective, particularly for products that are used with multiple accessories. And even the simplist products often have accessories or related products.

Location

What constitutes a cross-selling device? Where do you place a crossselling device? How do you enable cross-selling?

Webpage

A cross-selling device can be as simple as text in a webpage. The text makes the cross-selling offer, describes the product, and includes a link to the product’s webpage and a photograph. A popular device for cross-selling is a panel that includes three or four products. You can put it a variety of places.

Email

There are two ways to cross-sell using email. First, you can include products in the body (text) of a normal email. Again, these would be accessories or supplementary products to the product that was purchased. Included with the information would be links taking the buyer directly to the accessory products’ catalog webpages in your eBay Store. You would send such an email to customers soon after a purchase. You can experiment with the time lapse between a purchase and the follow-up email. A half-day, a day, a week or some other period might work best.

Second, you can include a cross-promotion panel in an email. This would be the same panel that you use for eBay auction ads, eBay Stores, or the eBay checkout. It’s a panel with three or four products together with their photographs. Normally, it would go at the bottom of the email. But, it could go anywhere in the body of the email too.

This approach to cross-selling can be used in the requisite follow-up emails for every transaction. For instance, you can include the crosspromotion panel in the original follow-up email after the ending of an auction. This is the email that you use to tell the buyer about the means of payment and the means of shipment. The cross-promotion panel email turns the email message itself into a dual-purpose email.

Newsletter

If you send out a periodic newsletter, you can customize it . For instance, you can include customer’s name and other customer information inside the body (text) of the newsletter using database technology. If you can do that much, you can also include a cross-promotion panel in the newsletter based on the customer’s last purchase. If your newsletter is monthly, the customer will see the cross-promotion panel no later than one month after the purchase. But, in any event, the cross-promotion panel is tailored to a customer’s purchases.

This is just one of many ideas that will enable you to use a cross-promotion panel productively. With the use of the panel or with other cross-selling techniques, the sky ’s the limit with what you do. Crossselling is effective when the cross-selling products are relevant and presented in a timely manner. This is a very powerful tool when used properly and efficiently.

Auction Management Services

You can easily send a follow-up email with cross-selling information in it. But with any kind of a volume of eBay retail business, that task would very quickly become burdensome and tedious. Therefore, you need an auction management service that facilitates such emails. In addition, to use the cross-promotion panel effectively, you need an auction management service that enables you to use the panel in a variety of places such as webpages, email, newsletters, and almost anywhere you can place an image.

When you choose an auction management service, keep this in mind. Carefully review what cross-selling features and devices the auction management service provides.

Expand Your Inventory

Trying to keep your eBay business simple and your inventory turning over at a high rate by having a limited number of products? That’s admirable and no doubt profitable. But you might be missing some easy sales through cross-selling.

If you are selling products that require accessories or related products, then it makes sense to stock such items and cross-sell them. This is particularly true where the accessories and related products are substantial merchandise. For instance, if you can sell someone a $60 camera bag after selling them a $180 camera, that’s good business that you don’t want to pass up. OK, so you don’t want to bother selling a customer 4 batteries for $3 after selling them a $180 camera. But how about selling them a pack of 40 batteries for $20?

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Cross-selling can be cost-effective if you automate it. The only way you can automate it is by using an appropriate auction management service. In others words, with the right software, it can be a cost-effective means of increasing sales.