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There seems to be a lot of confusion about these terms, so let me clarify before we get started.
Technically speaking, most of these plugins don’t offer upsells. They’re cross-selling plugins.
I’ll explain.
An upsell is not just a recommendation. An upsell is a more expensive version of the product the customer is about to buy. For instance, they are about to purchase a laptop with 16GB of memory and you recommend the more expensive 32GB version right before they checkout. Only one WooCommerce plugin here has a true upselling feature.
On the other hand, a cross-sell is a complementary product. For instance, headphones or a case for the laptop they’re purchasing. All of the plugins listed here offer cross-selling functionality like this.
And lastly, a related product is simply a similar product. For example, a list of other laptops like the one they’re looking at. This is also a feature all of the plugins in this collection offer.
With the technical sales terminology out of the way, let’s get to the plugins.
Cross sell plugins for WooCommerce
There are some amazing plugins listed here for boosting your sales with WooCommerce.
These plugins are highly flexible and offer numerous ways for you to improve your conversion rates and increase your average order value.
Here are my top picks for the best cross-sell and upsell WooCommerce plugins.
1. Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce
Plugin Description
Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce is the most robust and well-designed plugin for adding cross sells to WooCommerce. Using this plugin, you can add recommended products to your product pages and checkout page (including post-checkout popup).
The first way to boost your sales with this plugin is to add a frequently bought together section to your product pages. For example, you can recommend a pair of pants that go well with the shirt the customer is buying. You can also add a discount to further incentivize the sale. When the customer adds a product to their cart without the additional products, you can show the recommendations again in a popup with an “Add to cart” button.
Besides cross selling on the product page, you can also promote products on the checkout page. Rather than just listing the related products, you can show a one-time offer with a button to immediately add the item to the checkout screen. Even better, this plugin adds a post-purchase cross sell. After they click the purchase button, they’re shown a simple page where they’re asked if they want to add a featured item to their cart (at a discount). The payment will then be processed and they’ll be redirected to the thank you page like normal.
Rather than generate the recommendations automatically, this plugin lets you choose exactly which products you want to recommend via the product editor page. This makes it take longer to set up for a large store, but gives you full control over your cross sells.
Overall, Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce is the most advanced solution for boosting your sales with cross sells and related products.
2. YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together
Plugin Description
YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together is another great WooCommerce plugin for boosting sales. The way it works is simple.
With this plugin, you can display additional products right below the “Add to Cart” button on your product pages. Each product has the thumbnail image, price, and title included. Below are a series of checkboxes that let the customer easily decide which items they want to add to their cart before clicking the “Add all to cart” button. It’s a well-designed experience that makes it easy for customers to purchase related or best-selling products.
The most impressive feature is the ability to decide what kind of products you want to promote. You can show related products, cross-sells, up-sells, or custom products. For instance, choosing cross-sells might recommend headphones and a case when the customer is buying a laptop, whereas upsell would recommend a more expensive laptop. Related products would display similar laptops. It’s really nice to have this kind of control over your sales tactics, especially the custom option which lets you choose exactly which products to add in the “Frequently Bought Together” section. And it functions well as an upsell plugin because you can recommend a more expensive variation before they add the product to their cart.
3. One-Click Upsell Funnel for WooCommerce
Plugin Description
With One-Click Upsell Funnel for WooCommerce, you can add related products to the cart and checkout pages.
You can decide if you want to show the related products on the cart or checkout page and whether they should display above or below the form. There’s also a “rule engine” for deciding when to show the recommendations. For instance, you display related products based on the number of items in the customer’s cart or the total price of their order.
This is one of the only WooCommerce plugins that can show related products on the cart page. Most of the other plugins only add related products to the product page and checkout page.
It’s cheaper than some of the alternatives listed above, but it’s not as flexible or well-designed. For instance, it can only show related products and can’t distinguish between cross-sells and upsells or let you choose custom products, and the design of the slider is very basic. For these reasons, I would recommend going with one of the pricier but more robust plugins listed above since it will only take a sale or two to make up the difference.
4. Cart Upsell for WooCommerce
Plugin Description
Cart Upsell for WooCommerce lets you recommend additional products on the cart page. You’ll choose custom rules for each product to decide which products should show up as recommendations. For example, you could choose to only recommend products in your “Pants” category when someone adds a t-shirt to their cart.
The upsell box has a clean design and is customizable, allowing you to change the colors and text that appears in it. It shows up above the cart items whenever it finds an available recommendation. Unlike the plugin listed above, it only shows related products on the cart page and not at checkout.
While it has “upsells” in the title, it’s not a true upsell plugin unless you carefully configure the rules for this. It is more of a related product or cross-sell plugin for WooCommerce.
If you want a simple and affordable solution to recommend additional products on your cart page, this plugin will work well.
5. WooCommerce Checkout Upsell Funnel
Plugin Description
Despite the name, this is another plugin that lets you promote related and complementary products, not upsells. With this plugin, you can display additional products the customer might like on the checkout page to incentive a larger purchase. You even have the option to apply fixed or percentage-based discounts to the promoted products.
There’s a huge number of options for deciding exactly when to display the extra products and exactly which products you want to promote. There’s even a countdown timer you can add to create a sense of urgency. You could also add a recently viewed products section to further increase conversions on your checkout page.
The design is simple, but the functionality works great and WooCommerce Checkout Upsell Funnel is getting five-star ratings for its ability to boost eCommerce store earnings.
Which cross sell & upsell plugin is best?
Normally, it’s hard to pick just one plugin, but I think this post is different.
Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce is leagues ahead of the competition when it comes to cross-selling with WooCommerce. Not only does it offer a huge variety of cross-selling techniques, but it also has an awesome design to go with it.
YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together gets my second recommendation mainly because of the control you get over the recommendations and the quality of the design. The checkbox layout is highly effective and makes it so easy for customers to add more items to their cart.
Thanks for checking out this collection of the best WooCommerce cross-sell and upsell plugins. You can use the buttons below if you want to share it with your followers before you go.
