As we had reviewed possibilities on how to upsell electronics in the previous post, I would like to dig into another e-commerce industry and that’s fashion. Apparel stores are on the rise, customers overcome barriers of online fashion shopping every day. On the other hand fashion stores need to deal with return rates as big as 50% according to Shopify’s studies. So every penny that comes on the top of the order is a win for you. All in all the expected growth of the fashion and apparel industry from 2020 to 2022 is 15%. There is a lot of market share to fight over, so let’s take a look at how to perfect your sales funnels with upselling. We will fly through the best practices for upselling clothing.

1. Buy the Look – Shopify Bundles & Product Cross-sell

Buy the look is simply a product page upsell, where you use the presented outfit to pitch other pieces of clothing. It’s a great way to cross-sell more products. When you are making your own product pictures, just curate a few pieces of clothing together and you are always selling more than one thing.

A variant that you can see a lot on the internet is that merchants are publishing their customers’ social media posts wearing individual pieces of clothing, that has great potential for cross-selling, plus it’s a nice marketing perk and chance to connect with your customers. Cross-selling has essential use when you sell pieces worn by celebrities too. In that case, you can use the whole outfit to cross-sell selected pieces.

2. Cross-sell Private Brand

Let’s assume you have a great performing marketplace for fashion, but your margins are too small. You can use upselling to promote your private brand. As you have the data about your customers, you can fit in the products perfectly. If you sell high-quality shoes, maybe cross-sell some private brand high-quality socks or shoe care.

3. Trending Now – Cart or Product Upsell

Another product page cross-sell, but still a bit different. You can either pick the hottest products or those which sits in your storage. It’s a great example of using cross-sell promotion as another point of sale. Try to cross-sell smaller objects which are not so prone to be returned too. For example badges, stickers, bottles, watches, bracelets, etc. They might have a good take rate as they probably fit into the recommended price of the cross-sold product, which is 25% of the original product price.

4. Not sure? Automate with Smart Auto-upsells

Fashion marketplaces tend to offer a huge number of fashion products at the same time and it’s hard to set the upsell for each one of them manually. But on the other hand, to show the same offer on every product page is not just bad UX, but also a nasty hit for your average take rates. The point is to automate and optimize as much as you can, many shops have their own solutions, but if you don’t want to lose time with development, there are solutions directly from Shopify. With the use of tools given by Shopify, we developed a Smart Auto-Upsell, that you can use in your Candy Rack app.

Auto-upsell is a fully automatic cross-sell option. That means you’ll just select the smart upsell in the “create new upsell” menu, and it’ll choose the products to cross-sell automatically using Shopify’s API. In this particular API, products are recommended based on an algorithm that predicts the most relevant products based on the product a customer is interacting with.

If you want to see Smart Auto-Upsell in action take a look at Birdrockbaby store. Strong brand and one of our great customers that made exceptional use of automatic smart upsell option to increase their AOV.

5. Premium Services in Fashion Commerce

Many times reassured rule that the services have great take rates is truthful even for fashion stores. There are countless options depending on the type of apparel you sell. Some, that pop into mind are fro example customization upsells, gift packagings, premium shipping, and so on.

“First in Line” Service (Upsell at checkout)

Everybody knows that feeling when you can’t wait a minute longer for your dreamy pieces of clothing or when you just forgot about the important date and you need the package to arrive as soon as possible. “First in Line” works great for our customers in fashion. It’s a service that prioritizes customer’s orders in a merchant’s fulfillment center. It’s also pretty versatile and you can freely adjust it to perfectly match your shop. Another advantage is that it can be your USP (unique selling point), especially if the customer is under time pressure and your competition doesn’t have any special shipping offers. Analyze your shipping processes first – if you are able to give next day shipping to most of your daily customers- you can start testing it out. This service can be easily used as an upsell at checkout, which you can create for free without any app. My colleague Tom wrote a nice article on how to do that.

Customization Services

People love to pay something more to bring part of their individuality to their stuff. Customization upsell is a great way how to fulfill your customers’ needs. Candy Rack‘s upsell popup has an option to add a note field to the product you are upselling. With this perk, you can easily upsell some customizations as engraving names, own design ideas, and so on.

Gift Notes and Gift Packagings

Another way how to use note option is to include gift notes. They work great on products that tend to be bought as a gift, for example, jewelry or in the holiday season with gift packaging. Gift packagings are also a really good option to start testing services cross-sells, because many warehouses already have this option or if you are packing products yourself, just add some nice gift bags with notes. Don’t forget to never add gift packaging as a top layer of your parcel, because it will probably be destroyed during the shipping process. If you make a solid job with packaging, you’ll have some extra bucks with every order and good user experience.

The holiday season also brings the opportunity to sell some gift cards of yours. If you are wondering how to do it check out our Shopify gift cards guide.

If you are thinking about trying out some apps for upselling, give a chance to our Candy Rack for product page upsells or Candy Cart which is our Shopify cart upsell app. However, if you are looking for something different our list of best fashion Shopify apps might help you.