Related, Up-sell & Cross-sell products in Magento 2

Your e-commerce store is not very different from physical retail stores. It might not have the walls and windows but it works on same basic principles as any physical merchant establishment.
As in retail outlets, the biggest challenge a webshop owner faces is to increase foot-fall and hence bring in visitors to the webshop. This is generally done by advertisement and marketing in real world and by SEO, SEM and Adwords in digital world. Once you have visitors, you have to turn them into customers using high quality products, great prices, excellent services and various promotional schemes. However, you cannot afford to stop your efforts at that stage. Once you have successfully converted a visitor into a customer, you have to try and entice them to buy more products from you. Your aim should be to provide all the products and related accessories that the customer might need.

If you observe a checkout counter of any big retail outlet, you will notice that nobody really just buys 1 product. Most customers end up spending a bit more and buy the more expensive version of the product they originally intended to buy. Alot of customers also purchase related or even unrelated items in addition to their original & planned purchase. Physical retail outlets use a lot of psychological techniques to encourage this customer behaviour. Like those friendly and sugary sales executives smiling at you, those huge posters with happy people laughing with a salad/sandwich in their hand, or making customers walk through all the related products on their way to the main product or when going to the checkout counter. They even display items like chewing gums and chocolates right at the checkout counter so that customers buy them out of impulse.
This trick can also be emulated in online stores, sometimes even with greater efficiency and results as there is no limit to available shelf-space on online stores.

There are many simple and complex ways to increase sales in Magento but the simplest way is to use the default promotional blocks available in Magento.  You can use these blocks to display various other products that the customer might want to buy, while they are shopping for their original product.
Yes, we are talking about Related, Up-sell and Cross-sell products blocks!

Let's discuss each type of these promotional block and see how you can use them to improve your sales in Magento 2.2.X

1. Related Products
As the name suggests, 'Related products' are the products that are displayed on product details pages to customers in addition to the item the customer is looking at.
For example if you buy a television, the salesman will also try to sell you a sound system or a wall-mount. These are related products, which can be purchased in addition to the item the customer is originally looking to buy. You can place this related products block at the bottom of the product detail page or on the sidebars too. They should be clearly visible and easily accessible when a customer is looking at the main product. The customer should be able place the item in the shopping cart by simply clicking the check-box.

To add related products to your main products you need to first login to your Magento admin area > then go to Catalog > Products and open the product (to which you want to add related products) and click on 'Edit' link under 'Actions' column.
This will open the product in edit mode. Scroll down and open  the Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells section. Then click on 'Add Related Products' products.
It will display you a list of all your available products. You can use the filter options to find the exact products you want to add a related products.
From the list of products In the list, tick-select check-box of the products which you want to display as a related product on the front-end. You can add multiple products here.

Make sure that the products you select are enabled, in-stock and visible on front-end.

When you are done selecting all related products, you can click on 'Add Selected Products' button. It will look something like this:

2. Up-Sell Products

Again, as the name suggests, an 'up-sell product' is a product displayed to the customer as a more expensive or a better alternative to the product the customer is viewing or trying to buy.
How many times has it happened that you walked into a store aiming to buy a certain product and ended up buying a bit more expensive version because it gave more value for money? You never knew that you wanted those additional features until they were shown and explained to you by the sales-executive at the store.
Same logic works in online stores too. Customers do not always know all the available alternatives of a product that they want to buy. They might have one specific product in mind but if you present them with better alternatives (which are more popular or have more to offer) then the customer might spend a bit more and buy the pricier version. For example, if a customer is looking at a Television, you can up-sell them a higher model, or a pricier alternative from another/better company.
Up-sell products are generally displayed on the product detail pages and by default they will be titled “You may also be interested in the following product(s).”
But you can edit it and make it more interesting by calling it "Products especially recommended for you" or something more fancier too.

You can add up-sell products from the same admin section from where you added the Related products and have to follow the same process as explained above, but this time you have to click on 'Add Up-sell products' button instead.

3. Cross-Sell Products

Cross-sell products are mostly the products that a customer buys on impulse while they are completing their purchase. These products are similar to chewing-gums, chocolates and candies that are placed at the counter in the checkout line.
For example, if you are buying a tv, you might be tempted to buy batteries or even a gaming console.
These cross-sell items are displayed on the shopping cart page and depend on the products that are already in the shopping cart. This gives customers a last chance to add more items to their cart before they start the checkout process.

You can add cross-sell products from the same product edit section in admin area from where you added the Related and Up-sell products and have to follow the same process, but here you have to click on 'Add cross-sell products' button instead.


Do these three things correctly and you might be able to sell some more products when your customers are buying something from your webshop.
There are even some great third-party extensions out there that can help you with adding related, up-sell and cross-sell products automatically and efficiently. Let's talk about those extensions on some future post.

Feel free to contact Hungersoft to discuss how you can improve your customer experience and sales further.