“the action or practice of selling among or between established clients, markets, traders, etc.”

When put to use, cross-selling can be a powerful tool to engage your readers or customers – and persuade them to buy more of your product or read more of your content.  You are maximizing and enhancing your  visitor’s experience with your site.

Cross-selling products

If you are selling products online, then cross-selling can be a very powerful and simple way to increase your revenue.  By showing products that relate to what your visitor is looking for, you can (often) increase the number of products they buy from you.  Promoting other products that you sell that relate to what the visitor wants to buy, can have a huge impact on your revenue and profit.

For example, let’s assume that you are selling cell phones on your website.  While customers may intend on purchasing a cell phone from you – they might also be interested in buying a cell phone case, car charger, or any number of different items that you may sell.  Instead of your customer only purchasing a cell phone, they may end up buying a few accessories from you as well.

Amazon’s cross-selling strategy

Amazon.com does an excellent job at cross-selling their customers with their products.  When shopping on their site you can see how they implement the strategy very well:

Displaying items that are “Frequently Bought Together“

Displaying items that other customers bought along with the product

This not only provides a better customer experience (because you are showing visitors products that relate to their interest), but brings big returns on revenue and profit for the company.  Instead of your customer spending only $20 they may end up spending $30, $40, $50 or more – and effectively increasing your income per order/customer.

The Netflix $1 million prize

To even further reinforce how much of an impact cross-selling can have  – I want to give you one more example.

Netflix (the online movie rental company) proposed a challenge and offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could improve their movie recommendation system.  As posted on their website for the prize:

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: CinematchSM. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer’s unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.

Netflix has an excellent understanding of the power of aligning people with the right products.  Not only does effectively promoting related products increase usage and consumption of a company’s services, but it provides for a much more loyal, enthusiastic, and satisfied customer base.

The same amount of work… for more results

By setting up a system (no matter how simple or basic it might be) to cross-sell your products, you are maximizing your marketing and revenue-producing efforts.  You have done the hard work to get them to your site and have a captive audience.  It is not unusual to see revenue and profits increase dramatically when you implement this tactic.

It’s not just for the big guys

This strategy is not just reserved for the major retailers and global brands – even the smallest or most specialized websites that sell products can implement this strategy.  To get started you don’t need complicated algorithms and teams of engineers – simply cross-linking pages on your site to related products is a great start.

If you have an online store, implementing a way to cross-sell your visitors your products can have an amazing impact on your bottom line and something every online retailer should look to implement.

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While many of the solutions we are about to go over allow you to easily and securely sell digital products, they can just as easily be changed to sell tangible items as well.  Whatever option you choose, these solutions are the best of the best when it comes to processing and delivering products – digital or physical.

E-Junkie

My personal favorite preference for selling digital products would have to be E-Junkie.  What started out as a simple script designed to process payments and then deliver the digital goods, it has grown to become widely used and trusted for hundreds of online retailers and websites.

Pricing starts at the ridiculously low price of $5 per month if you plan on selling just a few items with upgrades available if you want to sell more items.  E-Junkie will facilitate the payment and delivery of your product through a payment processing gateway like PayPal, Authorize.net, or one of the many other merchant payment processors out there.

It is jam-packed with features that make setting up and running an online store a breeze.  I currently use E-Junkie myself and have found them to be (what I consider) the best solution available for delivering digital products, setting up affiliates, and processing your orders.

You can check them out by visiting their website here: E-Junkie

WP E-Commerce (WordPress e-Commerce Plugin)

WP E-Commerce is a hugely popular plugin that you can use to sell things on your website or blog.  Boasting over 300,000 downloads, it is robust, efficient, and best of all – free!

It is the leader in the pack of ecommerce plugins that have been developed for WordPress – and with good reason.  It boasts a myriad of different features that make it ideally suited to nearly any type of online store and is built specifically to run on a WordPress site.

While free, you do have the option of upgrading to a more feature-rich account that will allow you to create and do many more things with your site.

You can check them out by visiting their website here: WP E-Commerce

Which one should you choose?

That’s really up to you, however, with one being free and the other only $5 you don’t have much to lose trying them both out and then deciding which one works for you.  You want to be comfortable and familiar with them so you can do the things you want to do with your store (i.e. set up affiliates, deliver digital products automatically, etc.)

Both are simple, secure, ecommerce solutions for WordPress

Both of these products work wonderfully with WordPress and offer the security, reliability and support that you would come to expect of any paid product.  Lucky for us, they are very inexpensive to test out and extremely easy to get up and running.

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I have watched E-Junkie grow over the past couple years and it is terrific to see them growing as much as they have. It is always awesome when you see great products and ideas succeed.

While it seems it is most commonly used to facilitate the purchase of digital products (ebooks, information, reports, etc.) it does have the ability to process payment for nearly any type of product that you want to sell online.

It offers a ton of features, but I’ll just highlight a few of the major components:

E-Junkie Screenshot

Payment processing

E-Junkie can process transactions through nearly every major payment provider out there:

• 2CheckOut
• Authorize.Net
• ClickBank
• Google Checkout
• PayPal Pro
• PayPal Standard
• TrialPay

Quick, secure, and fast delivery of digital products

The really cool thing about E-Junkie is that it actually stores files (ebooks, website templates, etc.) and directs your customer to an area where they can immediately download the product after their payment is successful.

This solves some major headaches that go along with delivering digital products on the internet.  You don’t have to actually send the customer the products by email or send them to a certain page, E-Junkie handles all of it for you.  It’s instantaneous and will make your customers very happy that they get immediate access to the product that they purchased.

Tracking & inventory

If you’re selling tangible goods, you can limit and keep track of the items that you have on hand so you’re never sold out with the need to rush to get more inventory.

It also has the ability to easily integrate Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

Promotion, affiliates, and discounts

With E-Junkie you can set up an affiliate program for your products (awesome!), create discount codes for your products for promotional purposes, and offers you the ability to easily promote/syndicate your product(s) through some of the major shopping portals.

Pricing

Probably the most unbelievable and amazing part of E-Junkie is the ridiculous low price at which you can start selling online.  With E-Junkie, you can start at $5 (yep, you heard me right) which is an amazing price considering the features, options, and what E-Junkie can do for you.

A great shopping cart or alternative

E-Junkie is perfect for anyone who wants to sell products on the web.  I have used them for many projects over the past couple of years and could not be happier.  It’s simple, easy, and a great way for anyone to be able to start selling products online. You can visit their website to learn more at www.E-Junkie.com

Related posts:

1. How to sell Digital Products With WordPress There are many times when you may want to set...
2. The Power of Cross-Selling Products Online The Oxford English Dictionary defines cross-selling as: “the action or...
3. Ecommerce Theme – A WordPress theme for an online store Forget the expensive software, shopping carts, and hassles that go...