Case study: product configurator – cross-selling

One of the benefits of a customization product strategy is the increased average cart size.   Custom products tend to command a premium price, making the average cart size higher than products purchased via standard shopping catalogs.

Product configurators are also effective cross-selling tools.  The configurator guides the shopper through the customization flow: choose a product type, select functional attributes, pick style options.   The product configurator can then queue up related products as a last step in the shopping flow.  Accessories, for example, can be presented as a final stage before the add-to-cart stage.  These accessories and related products are specifically defined as matches by the product configurator’s rules engine.  The configurator then passes multiple SKUs to cart.  (Make sure your product configurator platform includes a rules engine for guided cross-selling).

Without product configurator based cross-selling, accessories and related products can only be shown at the cart level, or by a “continue shopping” prompt which forces the user to hunt around your site for matching products to add to their cart.   Asking your customer to do the extra work of finding their own accessories can cause frustration and decrease the average size of the cart.

Additionally, accessories and related products are often higher margin products.  The core custom product can be the “loss leader” that leads to the bundling of more profitable add-on products.   Visual product configurators inherently allow shoppers to bundle products themselves.   Bundling is a very profitable marketing strategy.

So how much does a product configurator add to the bottom line?  In this case study example, a Treehouse Logic configurator doubled sales of high margin accessory products.  On average, accessory sales are well above 200% of sales before a key cross-selling stage was added to the shopping flow.

Be careful of over cross-selling.  Shoppers have very little patience for too many nags to buy more related products.   And too many steps can be exhausting.  Position the cross-selling step as a useful last step that only shows a small number of targeted solutions.  Users appreciate guidance and will be more satisfied with your service if you can help them find just the right accessory to compliment their custom product.