Upselling & Cross Selling For Affiliates
Big retailers do what’s called upselling and cross selling. Upselling is the concept of trying to sell more expensive alternatives. Cross selling is a concept of selling accessories and other related items. In both cases, the essential goal is to make the customer spend more.
In the pre-internet age, the sales people mostly used their knowledge and experience to do this. But in the online shopping, retailers use sophisticated algorithms to do this. In the simplest form, retailers could just have some employees defining these upsell and cross sell relationships. In a little advanced form, retailers could pick up products within the same category but higher price for upselling and products from accessories categories for cross selling. An even more advanced form actually analyzes the click log and orders. By looking at the click logs, it would be possible to identify what the user initially wanted to buy but instead ended up buying a higher product (or lower for that matter and just flip the algorithm). Similarly, in an order, users typically buy the main product and it’s accessories. So, it’s possible to come up with cross selling relationships through this.
But for affiliates, much of this information is not available. And employing manual methods may not be easier. Here are some techniques I use.
1) Hot products: If the price of a product increases from the previous day, I assume that the demand for the product has increased and hence the price increase. This is not always true, but as we don’t have much info, we have to come up with some heuristics and this seems to be reasonable.
2) New products: If I find a new product in the product feed not tracked before, I consider it a new product. Over a period of time, this tracks very accurately.
3) Products on Sale: If the price of a product decreases from the previous day, I consider that it’s on sale. Or discounted. Sometimes the price changes are due to error in the first place. But again, for large set of data, this usually tracks well.
So, in addition to displaying the search results, I also have these promotional units of items. At present, I don’t have a mechanism to track the efficiency of this. I am in the process of modifying my scripts to track more accurately. I will report on that in a few days once I have more data.
