- Trick #61: Brand Your BusinessAnd Market It
- Trick #62: Link to Your Other Listings
- Trick #63: Set Up Product Cross-Promotions
- Trick #64: Encourage Add-On Sales
- Trick #65: Optimize Your Listings for Search
- Trick #66: Create an Email Mailing List
- Trick #67: Gain Exposure by Writing Reviews and Guides
- Trick #68: Use Google AdWords
- Trick #69: Feed Your Store Listings to Google Product Search
- Trick #70: Promote Your eBay Listings in the Real World
- eBay Business Profile: Balkowitsch Enterprises, Inc.
- A Rags to Riches Story
- How to Grow a Business
- Managing the Business
- Selling Strategies
- Keys to Success
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Trick #64: Encourage Add-On Sales
It costs less to sell additional items to an existing customer than it does to attract a new customer. That is, after you have someone hooked, additional profits come easily—if you can sell more items to that person.
To that end, it's in your best interest to encourage add-on sales. Instead of selling one shirt to a customer, try to sell two shirts instead—or a shirt and tie, or shirt and shoes, or whatever. Adding extra items to an existing sale doesn't cost you any more money in terms of promotion; it's a quick way to boost your profit per sale.
How do you encourage add-on sales? Here are some tricks to employ:
- Make sure to present your customers with a prominent link to your other eBay listings. This should be more than the default link that eBay creates; place a bigger link or clickable button within the body of your listing.
- Make it just as easy for the customer to view the listings in your eBay Store. Then, within your Store, make sure that you offer items that are complementary to the item the customer just purchased. If you're selling shoes, for example, your eBay Store should offer socks and shoe polish; if you're selling DVD players, offer connecting cables in your Store.
- Offer a combined shipping discount so that when the customer decides to purchase a second item, he doesn't pay double the shipping. Instead, offer some sort of deal, such as "$1.00 shipping for each additional item purchased."
- Offer a discount on additional items purchased. Maybe you offer a 10% discount on any items added to a purchase, or something similar—anything to encourage customers to add more items to their shopping cart.
However you accomplish it, the goal is to turn a $20 sale into a $30 one. The higher dollar value per sale, the higher your profit margin.