Sports are getting more and more accessible to the general public. You don’t have to be a pro athlete to have solid equipment. On the other hand, the willingness to spend … is growing too. Which opens many customer segments looking for an online shop to fill their needs. Doesn’t matter if you aim for entry-level sportsmen or extra niche-specific pro athletes, there is always a way to earn more and perfect the sales flow through upselling. Here’s the ultimate list of 7 recommendations on how to upsell sports stuff.

Don’t limit yourself by only spending your marketing budget on additional traffic to your site. Try to get the most out of the quality traffic you already have, which is also much more cost-effective. One of the ways how to get the most out of your sales funnel is to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services. In the sports industry, the same as in many others is always a way how to find some additional products to cross-sell. Here is few tips and best practices found in many big e-commerce sport-oriented stores.

1. Cross-sell small equipment

It could be protein samples, cycling bidons, shakers, or basically any product which tends to be substituted regularly. The basic logic behind this is first, customers are not weighed down by the importance of this decision because they need to buy this product frequently, and secondly, the decision making is also easy because of the lower price value. All in all, the cross-sold product has the best performance when its value is approximately less than 25% of the original product’s value. Check out how the cross-sell might look when done with our app Candy Rack.

2. Offer upgrades (true upsells)

You know it best, when you want something for your hobby, you’ll for sure find something a bit better than what you are about to purchase. If you use the right copy to motivate your customer, you have high chances to convert him to a more expensive product. Especially when it means slightly better performance for him.

3. Focus on niche group and be an expert

When you focus on a niche group or sport where you have strong expertise, you can guide your customers to buy products that fit each other best. A customer who is a beginner is usually looking for a hint, so he wouldn’t need to do exhausting researches for the advantages of certain products. It’s a win-win situation when you are the pro, who is making the experience much easier for your customers, and at the same time, it’s increasing your AOV.

Catch that fan base – local or global, it’s good to have your loyal customers who will definitely come back again and buy that newest apparel you cross-sell.

4. Offer premium services

Services cross-sells tend to have great take rates. It’s up to every merchant to find the right fit for services that would be beneficial for his customers. In sports, it could be transport insurance, because, let’s be honest, sports equipment is not always cheap. Another good initiative is to provide free services after your clients turn into “club members” on your site and, of course, you can cross-sell the membership too.

My colleague Tom wrote an excellent article about checkout cross-sell which you can use for free and without any app, so check that out too.

5. Create product bundles

Bundling works great with proteins and other sports supplements, especially when you don’t have that many recurring customers. This means that it’s great to use bundles during customer acquisition campaigns, most often on social media. However, if the majority of orders are from recurring customers, pay attention to hoarding. Hoarding, in this case, means that your regulars will buy a bigger portion of goods at once for a better price, and that will affect your sales in the future.

6. Sell the outfit (“buy the look”)

Peter Sagan has his eyewear, Roger Federer his caps, and so on. Celebrities sell great but, you don’t need to spend big bucks on collabs to enrich your sales funnels. Buy the look can work for sports the same as for fashion, you just need to use product photos with the whole kit, and then cross-sell them with one another. You can also use this cross-sell on your social media accounts or by sharing your customer’s posts from social.

7. Seasonalities and changes – always be up to date

Did your football club changed their jerseys, do you have new stickers or is there any news that your customers could be interested in? Always bring proactively all the news and don’t be afraid to monetize on them. Set the news to the front or just add it to your sales funnel, for example, into your upsell pop-up.

All of this is possible with one of our apps Candy Rack or Candy Cart. So you can test out some of the sports upsell approaches above with us. However, if you are looking for something different our list of best fashion Shopify apps might help you.

Either way, happy upselling.