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How to use Shopify's product recommendation engine to offer data-driven upsells

February 16, 2021

Imagine for a second that you could increase the order value of all your historic orders by 10%. How would that affect your bottom line? Your liquidity? Your return on your marketing?

Unfortunately, you can’t change the past. But if you implement the below you can increase the value of all your future orders by 5%-10% in a couple of minutes.

How? By offering one or more upsells to all your customers.

upsell /ˈʌpsɛl/verb persuade a customer to buy something additional or more expensive.

“But it’s difficult and time-consuming to choose which product X to offer when my customer buys product Y!”

No, it’s not. Not if you leverage data and a product recommendation engine to dynamically choose which products to recommend to your customers based on what they put in their cart. In layman’s terms, a recommendation engine crunches some numbers and recommends other products most likely to be relevant based on past orders in your store.

Do this:

  1. Install the Candy Rack Shopify app. If you install the app and write “data-driven eCommerce” to their live chat, the app developers promised me to extend your free trial from 14 days to 2 months, so you can test it out and see if it works for you.

  2. Open the app, go to settings and customize the text and colors as wanted.

  3. Go to the app dashboard and click “New upsell”, select “Smart auto-upsell”.

  4. Select 3 in product count, display for all products, and deselect all settings except for “Don't display if the product is already in the cart”.

  5. Done!

That’s it. You are now making a data-driven product recommendation to anyone adding a product to their cart. These exact steps have generated around 6% in extra revenue for my own stores in the last 30 days - 60% of that from the direct sales from the upsell and an estimated 40% through extra add to carts that are being converted through my retargeting efforts. As we’re currently in low seasons, I expect this to increase to ~10% soon. Not bad.

Do you want to take it a step further? Install the Candy Cart app to offer dynamic upsells when a customer checks out. If you write “data-driven eCommerce” to their live chat, you are getting 25% on the second app.

Note: I’m not getting any kickback or %s from this. I’m just a happy customer who reached out to the developers to tell them that I planned to send this. They were kind to offer an extended 2 month trial period and 25% off on the purchase of a second app of theirs. Just write “data-driven eCommerce” to their live chat, and they will help you.

Feel free to reach out if you need any help setting it up! And remember to sign up for my newsletter to receive more like this.

Godspeed,Mathias