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Upselling

Written by: Will Atkinson

Article Overview: When used properly, upselling can be an effective, and unobtrusive technique to increase your average dollars per sale.

Upselling

Upselling is almost as old as selling, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. Sure, the goal is to get the customer to buy more products from you, but the way you approach it can make a big difference in effectiveness, and your store's image in the long run.

What to avoid: You don't want to turn upselling into borderline harassment of your customers at the checkout line. If the clerks are encouraged to offer every customer extra items, free samples, and "extended warranty" type things at checkout, then pretty soon your customers will feel hassled and your store will get the reputation as being a hard sell environment.

What SHOULD you do? You should use your POS system to tag related items as upsell items so that it can alert the clerk to offer the customer the related item when they are purchasing the first item. For example, if you sell specialty home goods, then if a customer is buying a bottle of bath soap, you could upsell them with a new sponge or shower ball.
If you are in electronics and someone is buying a new DVD player, upsell them a universal remote or HDMI cables.
The goal is to use your product knowledge and expertise to offer the customer items related to what they are already purchasing to help them achieve a better result in the end. If you can supply useful product advice, in the form of a courteous upsell, then you'll likely enhance the customer experience and continually demonstrate your product expertise and commitment to customer satisfaction.

You'll make more money too.

Related Articles
  More on Upselling
  30 Seconds to Significant Sales - How to upsell without turning off your customer
  Upselling Again
  Add Up-selling and Cross-selling to Your Sale Cycle
  How to increase sales by upselling

Article Tags: bath soap, checkout line, clerks, customer experience, customer satisfaction, dvd player, extended warranty, free samples, harassment, hdmi cables, home goods, money, pos system, product advice, product expertise, product knowledge, reputation, sponge, warranty, warranty type



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