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- What is cross-selling?
- 10 Top Cross-Selling Strategies To Consider For Your Sales Plan
- #1. Bundle products and services
- #2. Flexible pricing
- #3. Showcase product recommendations
- #4. Don’t oversell anything else
- #5. Optimize customer services
- #6. Track customer behavior
- #7. Use auto-trigger messages
- #8. Encourage paid memberships
- #9. Make cross-selling at the perfect time
- #10. Retarget your cross-sells
- How To Add Cross-Sell Elements On Shopify Using GemPages
- Conclusion
- FAQs
10 Best Cross-Selling Strategies To Upgrade Your Shopify Sales Performance
In our dynamic eCommerce landscape, maximizing revenue from existing customers is a game-changer. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is to utilize cross-selling strategies to encourage customers to buy complementary products or services with their primary purchases. However, many sellers failed with them, leading to lost sales and a poor customer experience.
This article will dive into 10 top cross-selling strategies tailored for eCommerce sellers, especially Shopify, to help elevate your business performance in 2025. You can also learn how to use tools to master the art of cross-selling and upselling strategies quickly and effectively.
Right now, let’s get started with us!
What is cross-selling?
Cross-selling is the practice of recommending related or complementary products (often in the checkout stage) to customers based on what they’re already purchasing. It is not just a sales technique—it is a chance to provide more value and a more personalized shopping experience.
According to Data Axle USA, 80% of eCommerce sellers in the U.S. reported that cross-selling strategies helped them increase their sales by up to 30%. This effectiveness is significantly due to cross-selling's ability to boost eCommerce AOV, a crucial metric influencing overall revenue.
While often used in B2C, B2B cross-selling strategies have transformed their performance, especially in service-based industries. For example, cross-selling strategies in insurance can strengthen client relationships, generate high-quality referrals, and increase lifetime buyer value. Consequently, businesses maximize their revenue and position themselves as trusted advisors.
Learn more: Cross-selling and Up-selling: The Ultimate Guide to Driving Sales
10 Top Cross-Selling Strategies To Consider For Your Sales Plan
Below are the 10 actionable cross-selling strategies to supercharge your eCommerce sales. Based on your business goals and sales campaigns, test and have a proper implementation.
#1. Bundle products and services
This is one of the most effective cross-selling strategies in eCommerce. Related products can be packaged together, such as Apple's bundle of an iPhone with AirPods for larger purchases. However, to succeed in this, your customers might have previously perceived additional value.
On the other hand, creating product bundles should be a strategic setup, not just a random one. This means that the products and services grouped naturally complement each other and solve a broader problem for the customers. Also, don’t forget to learn how to optimize the display of product bundles on your eCommerce store to maximize visibility and appeal in customers’ eyes.
#2. Flexible pricing
Establishing tiered pricing can encourage customers to buy more by offering incremental discounts like “Buy 2, get 10% off.” These small nudges might result in customers adding more products to qualify for a better deal, making it one of the common cross-selling strategies. This is a psychological win-win: shoppers perceive more value, and sellers make more sales.
You can also combine this strategy with urgency elements like countdown timers, low-stock alerts, and limited-time offers. This adds a sense of scarcity, prompting quicker decisions and boosting product conversions. And top-rated landing page builders on Shopify, like GemPages, allow you to highlight these visually across key areas, from product pages to checkout flows.
#3. Showcase product recommendations
Next, we will discuss personalized product recommendations based on user behavior. Amazon highlighted that its recommendation engine could generate 35% of its revenue, proving that making recommendations based on customer demands and shopping journeys is very important.
Showcasing relevant products is one of the most effective cross-selling strategies
Online sellers can use customer browsing history, purchase behavior, and best-selling data to guide proper suggestions. However, always ensure the layout is context-specific, not spamming. The more relevant and timely the recommendation, the more likely customers are to act on it.
#4. Don’t oversell anything else
Although cross-selling strategies encourage selling more to boost sales, they can overwhelm customers if you display too many unrelated options as pushy and spammy. Thus, let’s limit it to 1-3 suggestions that are tightly connected to the original items to engage customers effectively. Even in some situations, it's best to avoid cross-selling altogether to create a better experience.
#5. Optimize customer services
Customer services play a key role in all sales approaches, and cross-selling is no exception. When handled properly, support queries are an opportunity to recommend solutions, not just resolve issues. It is also recommended to embed AI-suggestion tools in your live chat to make these interactions seamless, build trust, and increase the likelihood of additional purchases.
Sellers can integrate AI suggestion tools in live chats to optimize customer experience
#6. Track customer behavior
This cross-selling strategy is part of leaning into cross-selling purchasing, demanding a strong understanding of what customers want and prefer now. Top tools, such as Google Analytics, allow for watching user interactions via heatmaps, session recordings, and funnel analysis. From that, you can identify where customers drop off and which products they hover over most. All of these insights are crucial to refining cross-sell placements and improving the final results.
#7. Use auto-trigger messages
These messages can be triggered based on time spent on a page, exit intent, scroll depth, or specific product actions, which is effective in driving timely cross-sells. Let’s look at an example: If someone adds a tent to their cart, a pop-up might suggest a sleeping bag or portable stove. These timely prompts help increase the relevance and urgency of your offers for optimized AOV.
#8. Encourage paid memberships
Paid memberships or loyalty programs can foster long-term customer engagement and make cross-selling more effective. Registered buyers are more likely to buy additional products to take advantage of exclusive perks, like discounts, early access to new products, or free shipping.
However, to make this strategy truly efficient, it requires a well-designed program with clear benefits and easy accessibility for all customers. They should clearly understand the value they get from joining, and the rewards should be enticing enough to encourage repeat purchases. Otherwise, if the program isn’t valuable or easy to use, customers may cancel their subscription.
#9. Make cross-selling at the perfect time
The success of cross-selling strategies largely depends on timing. This part will showcase how to approach them at different stages to boost product conversion rates and business sales.
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Browsing phase
Customers tend to surf product pages to form ideas about what they need. Therefore, you can display complementary products in one category here to plant the seed for a larger purchase. The goal of this is to inspire without overwhelming, keeping suggestions subtle and reasonable.
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Checkout phase
This is when customers are most committed, having added items to their cart and preparing to close deals. That’s why offering cross-sells at this high-intent moment, like in the cart or during checkout, feels like a helpful nudge. Sellers should focus on highly relevant recommendations to the cart, presented as a way to enhance the purchase, and paired with incentives like discounts.
Sellers can offer cross-selling items in the checkout phase to increase sales
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Post-purchase phase
After customers finish their checkout, they are still engaged and receptive to relevant offers. Sellers can set up thank-you pages or follow-up emails to suggest complementary products that enhance their recent purchases. In other words, this phase is ideal for building loyalty, giving you a chance to show your understanding of customer demands to encourage future purchases.
#10. Retarget your cross-sells
Last but not least, be willing to reshape your cross-selling strategies if needed. Customer behavior can change over time, and factors like celebrations or holidays can all impact what customers are interested in. Therefore, staying flexible and responsive is crucial to succeeding.
Sellers should flexibly reshape cross-selling campaigns on holidays or celebrations
You can utilize tools like email campaigns, retargeting ads, or personalized recommendations to stay top of mind with visitors and encourage them to return and finish additional purchases. And test regularly to ensure you’re offering the right products to the right customers at the right time.
How To Add Cross-Sell Elements On Shopify Using GemPages
GemPages is the #1 conversion-focused Shopify storefront builder, offering 200+ templates for all industries and niches to help sellers effortlessly create high-converting, user-friendly stores. GemPages allows for fully customizing sales funnels with diverse built-in CRO and sales boosters and cross-sell, upsell, and down-sell offers. Moreover, its drag-and-drop interface simplifies this process without coding, making it perfect for beginners and seasonal merchants.
GemPages allows for working CRO templates and fully customizable sales funnels
Besides simple recommendation sections available in GemPages’ templates, Shopify sellers can use cross-sell elements empowered by a third party to keep customers more engaged. Importantly, you need to ensure that this app can work well with both GemPages and Shopify. And one of the most common names we want to mention here is Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC.
Below is a summary on how to install Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC into your Shopify store:
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Step 1: In the Shopify App Store, click Install to integrate this app into your current store
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Step 2: In the Apps section of your Shopify admin, select Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC
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Step 3: In the dashboard, click Assign to start your cross-sell setups
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Step 4: Select a desired page and click Assign Product on the row Cross Sells
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Step 5: Set up your product references and display settings, then click Save
You can modify display options in Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC on cross-sell items
After Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC is ready, it’s time to adjust cross-sell elements:
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Step 1: In the GemPages Builder App, navigate to a proper page to start
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Step 2: Search Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC by clicking on elements in the left panel
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Step 3: Simply drag and drop the cross-sell element to your desired position
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Step 4: Click Save and Preview, then Publish to finish this process
Similarly, you can adopt these steps for your upselling campaign by enabling the Upsell row. After that, adequately set up product preferences and position upsell elements on your pages.
Learn more: Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC
Conclusion
Mastering cross-selling strategies not only transforms eCommerce business performance but also improves a customer's shopping journey and establishes a strong brand identity effectively. With the 12 proven strategies above, hopefully, you now feel equipped to attain the best results. Don’t forget to leverage powerful tools like GemPages to design high-converting pages that first capture your customers' attention, and then effortlessly present cross-selling recommendations.
To gain a deep understanding of eCommerce and Shopify, let’s check out GemPages blogs. Wishing eCommerce merchants the best things in sales, branding, and business operations!
FAQs
Don’t: Offer too many options, distract from the main purchase, and suggest unrelated items.
