Would You Like Cross-sell With That? Yahoo! Improves Cross-sell Feature

October 31, 2007 | In Marketing/Promotion, News & Announcements |

Most of us have had the experience of being asked whether we want to add fries to a fast food order, add batteries to the purchase of any product that requires them, or to upgrade to a higher end model when selecting frankly anything at an electronics store. These scenarios are common because cross-selling is a great way to encourage the purchase of additional products and increase order size. Today we’re introducing two features to help you improve your cross-sell efforts: auto-suggestions and product page cross-sell.

cross-sell feature on product pages
Cross-sell items displayed on a product page

If you have 10 products, it’s pretty easy to come up with cross-sell rules based on what you know about how those products sell. For example, your birdhouses are often sold along with a bag of bird seed, your first aid kits tend to sell well with lawn darts, etc. However, once your product offering grows, so do the possible product combinations, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep an accurate finger on the pulse of every product’s sales behavior. Let’s say you have a store with an inventory of 20 products. If you decided to cross-sell just 3 items next to each product, you would have over 5000 cross-sell combinations to choose from. Imagine what a store with 200 or even 2000 products would have to do to keep up! This is where our new cross-sell auto-suggestions feature comes in. Using a combination of Yahoo! behavioral targeting technology, past purchase combinations, and past navigation history for your store, you can opt to have products auto-suggested to your shoppers, which reduces the need to set up cross-sell rules for each product.

In this same release, we’re also introducing the ability to cross-sell on product pages. For an online shopper, adding a product to their cart is making a certain level of commitment. Cross-selling in the cart is a good opportunity to suggest additional items that complement the product the shopper has selected. However, as a merchant you shouldn’t have to wait for a shopper to add something to their cart in order to cross-sell them additional or related items. Shoppers who in the past did not add products to their cart may just not have seen the product they were looking for, even if it existed in your store. With cross-sell on product pages, you can capture their interest and show them relevant products that will turn them from browsers to buyers.

Please refer to the Cross-Sell Help documents for more information on this new feature.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Note: These new features are available to Standard, Professional and Store merchants who have Checkout Manager enabled.

[Edit–11/01/07: Comments are fixed now. If you don’t see your comment or did not receive a reply, please submit them again.–Paul]

[Edit–10/31/07: An issue with our build of WordPress is submitting comments but without any content. We received numerous comments today but without any of the content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions.–Paul]

[Edit–10/30/07: It appears that WordPress may be having an issue at the moment with comments. Comments are coming through without any content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions. We’ll post the comments when the issue is resolved.–Paul]

8 Comments »

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  1. Bob and Pat–
    WordPress hiccupped again and your comments were deleted.

    Bob–I know you got your answer to why cross-sell items were not appearing on the page you set up. For any one else trying to add cross-sell to product pages here are three things to keep in mind:

    1) you must be using Checkout Manager to use auto-suggestions and have product page cross-sell enabled in Cross-sell Manager.

    2) you must insert the cross-sell code into the page on which you wish the cross-sell items to appear and publish–there is no preview of live cross-sells in the Editor but you can download sample HTML code to preview in the Editor and set up any styles.

    3) the product on which you are testing cross-sell needs to have at least one auto-suggestion (unless you use manual rules) so merchants should choose a top selling product with which to test. If an item does not have sufficient sales or navigation history, there will be no auto-suggestions presented.

    Pat

    You had three questions.

    The first related to the font size of cross-sell items being too large. You can control this with CSS and there is a help document available for changing the appearance of cross-sell.

    Your second question related to the original cross-sell text which could be interpreted incorrectly by shoppers to mean the price for the main item and the cross-sell item. This text has been changed now to “[price] when purchased with this item”.

    Your last question related to always and never rules. These are applicable to manual rules you create and there is a help document explaining always and never rules available in the cross-sell help files.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — November 3, 2007 #

  2. Now this a great tool for us!
    Just would like to know. Does Yahoo use historical date from previous years or does it only use the data after you install the program on your web site.
    Not all the product have cross sale advertising.

    Thanks,
    Jack

    Comment by Jack — November 7, 2007 #

  3. Jack–
    We are using historical sales data as part of the auto-suggestions, along with navigation history (click paths). Navigation history goes back to when the code first appeared on merchant pages (the first publish after released in late August) but sales data goes back through all sales data. Where products have been sold together or viewed together over a certain threshold is where auto-suggestions will be made for those products.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — November 7, 2007 #

  4. Cross selling is a very interesting concept. I will have to read more about it.

    Comment by Wanda — January 7, 2008 #

  5. Pardon me but I don’t quite understand “If an item does not have sufficient sales or navigation history, there will be no auto-suggestions presented”. What exactly does “sufficient” mean? Thanks.

    Comment by The Dog Clothes Company — January 11, 2008 #

  6. Sufficient sales and navigation history in terms of cross-sell means the following:
    –sales history: the number of orders where two products were purchased together indicating a relationship between the two products for shoppers
    –navigation history: the number of times two products were viewed within the same session indicating shoppers browsed these items during a visit

    Our cross-sell engine then uses the sales and navigation history to look for these browsing or buying patterns and when they reach a certain threshold, a cross-sell rule for the products is created in our auto-suggestion database. The number of page views or purchases is set high enough to establish a certain degree of confidence that the suggestions are useful to shoppers (and by extension merchants). If set too low, the suggestions would be of lower quality to shoppers leading to decreased usage. Our team is monitoring click-thru data though to ensure the quality of results and will make changes as necessary.
    –Paul

    Comment by pboisver — January 11, 2008 #

  7. Cross sell serves two very good purposes. It helps your customer find related items to similar products you offer. Also on the SEO side of things it adds targeted links to your pages.

    Comment by Her Wedding Favors — March 16, 2008 #

  8. This is very good news. I have been considering a Yahoo store for some time and it is features like this that make the difference. With a new store there would be no previous history so I guess this would have to be built up over time. Is this correct?

    Thanks
    Graham

    Comment by Success — April 3, 2008 #

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