The process of customer upselling has been a hallmark of retail marketing for decades. Have you ever been a cheerful victim of the upsell syndrome? We believe you have. Upselling is considered standard operating procedure at all major fast food chains and even a few glitzy restaurants. If you happen to order a burger and French fries, you will be asked if you would like a Coke. If you order a combo meal which includes burger, fries and Pepsi, you will be "encouraged" to order an All American apple pie. Upsell is the way to go when it comes to retail. Is it a different story in the world of shopping carts, payment gateways and Internet e-commerce? Let us find out.

Upselling on the Internet:

As an Internet entrepreneur, you have more than one way in which you can upsell to your customers. You can use the proactive chat feature of your live chat software system to make product recommendations moments before the customer is ready to pay for the order. Additionally, when live chat customers invoke live chat from the Complete my Order page, you can train your live chat agents to upsell by making product suggestions while they monitor the shopping cart and answer questions from customers. Technically, this is upselling too.

Some experts believe that these practices have the tendency of driving away customers and prompting online shoppers to abandon the entire shopping cart which is obviously not good for business. Whether this works for you or not can be established only through trial and error combined with a dose of scientific testing.

The standard way to engage in online customer upselling is through the check-out process. There are many creative ways to do so, some effective and some not so effective, some risky with the potential of either a total loss of sale or a higher return and others not too risky. Since upselling on the Internet is more of an art than a science, subtle experimentation may be in order. Here are a few brief insights and some recommendations:

The Suggestive approach to Online Upselling:

Many leading e-commerce portals such as Amazon use this process. Under a heading which says "Customers who bought this also bought" a list of possible choices are displayed thus allowing customers to add to their shopping carts. This is considered one of the safest ways to upsell because it not only eliminates the necessity to take customers away from the shopping cart, it literally allows customers to add to it in broad daylight thus enhancing the overall quality of the online shopping experience.

The URL Redirection Approach:

In this approach, the Pay with Paypal or the Pay with your Credit Card Buttons, instead of taking you to their respective payment gateways, take you to a page or a pop-up with more buying options all of which can be added to the shopping cart. There is a "No Thanks" button which then takes customers to the appropriate payment gateway. The intermediary page, also known as the secondary sales page, can be configured in accordance with the type and quantities of product originally purchased by customers.

Upsell Plugins from Commercially available Shopping Carts:

Many hosted as well as non-hosted shopping carts provide in-built upsell functionality. 1ShoppingCart.com, for instance, provides dynamic upsell capabilities which can be customized and configured to meet customer preferences.

Upsell Scripts and |Advisory Services:

Many shopping cart and e-commerce optimization services provide one-click upsell and downsell solutions that go right in and integrate with your payment gateway. For instance:

Nanacast.com

Provides multiple options to help you what the industry likes to call the "customize your order" feature.

If you are currently operating a Wordpress membership website or are considering setting one up that will also provide e-commerce shopping cart functionality, the membership plugin from:

Digitalaccesspass.com

Provides genuine one-click upsell functionality that integrates with all the major payment gateways with many customization features.

Several online shopping companies have articulated an upsell strategy that is specific to their product line—a milestone they may have achieved after weeks and months of testing.

To Upsell or not to Upsell:

That's a million dollar question if not a tough call. Let us say that the jury is still out on it. As the owner of an online business, you always run the risk of losing the entire sale in the process of trying to upsell to your customers. While there are some customers who will gladly embrace an upsell value proposition, there are others who will not hesitate for a moment to abandon the entire shopping cart and write off the experience in a heart beat. Data on percentages and frequency is by no means conclusive and the best way to find out is by coming up with a few upsell value propositions that you believe your customers cannot and will not refuse or turn down.