Both Candy Rack and Candy Cart are designed to upsell the customer. But there are certain differences and reasons why we have decided to separate these apps.

1. Upsell Pop-up Trigger

The main difference is where the upsell pop-up actually appear and when it’s being triggered. For Candy Rack, the pop-up is triggered only on the homepage (in case the store is selling a single product) or product page after clicking on the Add to Cart button. That also means the customer may continue shopping and browsing on the store.

For Candy Cart, the upsell pop-up is displayed before the customer is reaching the checkout and he/she is ready to finish the order. That’s typically after clicking on the Checkout button on the cart page or in the Ajax/drawer cart.

2. Targetting

Given the different locations and user flows, each app is supposed to target different upsell opportunities. For Candy Rack, the upsell is typically related to the product. For example, you are buying a 64GB iPhone and you offer the user an upsell for 128GB one or fitting cover.

While for Candy Cart, the upsell is related to the whole cart/order. Typically merchants want to offer here special deals or services applicable for the whole basket.

3. Design & UI

From the design point of view, both apps are very similar. But that’s on purpose. Initially, we wanted Candy Cart pop-up to look differently, something like this.

Or this.

But we realized Candy Rack tree structure is the most effective way of upselling/cross-selling. That was also proven several times during the A/B testing. So we have decided to use a similar layout in order to achieve the best conversion.

The app user interface (admin) is practically the same because again we believe it’s proven and easy to understand. We also tried to come up with the proposal of how both apps look when integrated and it would be just super confusing to have two Product Upsell offers. One for product page and for cart page.

4. Technology

There is also a big difference in how both apps are developed. Candy Rack is using a standard Shopify checkout.

For Candy Cart, we have decided to go with the draft orders which are much more reliable and we have successfully tested them with our other app called Gift Box. It also takes advantage of draft orders to create custom products without having to generate them.

5. Discounts

Candy Rack is using discount coupons for discounting the upsell offers. Discount codes are a safe solution in this case because they are Buy X Get Y type of codes. However, the disadvantage is that only one discount code can be used per order. So if merchant want to offer multiple discounted upsells, the discount will simply apply to only one of them. The only workaround is creating a shared discount code.

While in Candy Cart, merchants can offer multiple upsells with different discount levels and all will work smoothly thanks to draft order.

6. Naming

Based on our experience with Candy Rack, we see many merchants searching for the app name which is easy to remember and allow us to build its own brand. That’s why we agreed to use a similar name and keep the Candy part which will hopefully lead to another strong app name which merchants will be searching for directly.

Conclusion – Why we just haven’t integrated both apps into one

One may ask why we haven’t just integrated Candy Cart upsell into Candy Rack as another upsell type. It’s certainly a valid question. But what we have learned from our existing merchants is they are looking for one or another. They don’t want to display upsell pop-up on the product page and then another one on the cart page. That would be too intrusive.

Originally, we wanted to integrate the in-cart upsell functionality into Candy Rack, but we honestly couldn’t come up with a clear way how to differentiate it and make it clear for our merchants.

Besides that, the technology is different and by integrating Candy Cart into Candy Rack, we would need to drop draft orders which means merchants would lose their key feature – offering multiple discounted upsells.

We have quite a few merchants which were asking for the upsell on the cart page. We have explained this is something we are working on and will be available as a new app. Everyone understood and agreed to be informed when launched. No one expected or asked why it won’t be part of Candy Rack.

Also, we believe it would be super confusing to combine both and merchants wouldn’t understand the difference between each. Having two apps will simply allow us to better differentiate and position them.