It’s always great to make a sale, whatever its value, but if you can add to the worth of that sale by using various upselling techniques, your online revenue could rocket. Anybody looking to earn money online should consider upselling as a way to expand their business.

So what is upselling? Quite simply it is the concept of offering your customers something additional to, or more expensive than, the initial product they select to buy. The best known example is a well known fast food chain that never sells a burger without asking if the customer wants fries, or if they’d like to super size their meal.

Try different upselling strategies

There are a number of strategies to adopt when you are upselling. The first and most commonly used is bundling. This means that you group together a number of products, including the one that your customer initially chose, and sell them for less than the total cost of buying them individually. Once your customer has chosen a product, you can point out the bundled offer to them showing them that they get much better value if they buy the whole group, and not solely the first product.

The second method of upselling is waiting until your customer has selected a product and then suggesting a better and more expensive alternative. It should be a similar product, but perhaps with increased functionality or capacity. Ideally you will offer the more expensive product at a special rate, so the customer feels they are getting a good deal, but you will still be getting more revenue than if they had bought the original product.

The final upselling method is to suggest accessories and add-ons to the original product. You can sell these by saying that while the product is excellent on its own, it is absolutely fantastic when used with the added extras. You can probably get away with adding accessories up to about fifty per cent of the value of the original product before the customer starts to feel they are being ripped off.

Where to draw the line with upselling

So are there any downsides to upselling? The main drawback to upselling is knowing where to draw the line between getting a high value sale, and being too aggressive and alienating your customers.

Making the decision about when to suggest an upsell can be tricky. If you start upselling to your customers before they have paid for their initial product selection, do you risk losing that sale altogether? If you wait until they have handed over their cash, is it too late to suggest an upgrade, accessory or bundle?

If you’re not sure about your upselling strategy, and are worried about being too pushy or a walk over, you might want to consider a system that manages upselling for you. Forced money is a new online system that automatically offers appropriate upsells to your customers that have been tried and tested without you having to decide what to offer and when.