Using Shopify Scripts to Supercharge Product Recommendations
One of the keys to building a lasting relationship with your customers is being able to anticipate their needs and continuously provide value through well-timed offers and user experiences that feel personalized. If you do this effectively, they will reward you with their loyalty and ambassadorship.
Achieving these goals is no easy feat, but if you’re a merchant selling on Shopify Plus, you can harness the power of Shopify Scripts together with the Order Bump app to automate the shopping cart and checkout to help you optimize sales and improve customer satisfaction. Here are some examples of the possibilities:
- Free shipping
- Minimum ($) threshold discounts
- Tiered pricing discounts
- Quick discounts
- Product bundling discounts
TL;DR — If you’re a Shopify Plus merchant looking to take your product recommendations to the next level, scroll to the end and we’ll link you to a free script generator tool for Shopify Plus. The rest of the article describes how you can use Shopify Scripts together with the Order Bump app to power your product discounts and promotional offers.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, shopping online was very much a self-directed activity that placed all the impetus of product discovery on the user. Don’t love the item you’re seeing? Well, we have alternatives, but good luck finding them… Found the item you want but need an accessory? It’s somewhere on the site, you’ll just have to look for it. And this is the way it was when you wanted to buy things on the Internet…until product recommendations and strategic merchandising became cornerstones for providing users with a high quality customer experience.
In today’s e-commerce landscape product recommendations, cross-selling and up-selling have become so ubiquitous that nearly all major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc. offer some basic version of it out-of-box. If you’re an online merchant, this is great news for you, right? Well, yes, but just as you and everyone else running an online store can leverage the ‘power’ of product recommendations, it’s very likely that standard product recommendations have lost most of their novelty amongst even the most novice of online shoppers.
So as a merchant looking to add value to your customer experience, sell through your inventory, and increase important sales metrics like average order value (AOV) and units per transaction (UPT), what do you do? You take a) a more precise approach to up-selling and cross-selling — timing is critical to a successful conversion — and b) you pair it with the right incentives that will nudge your users into action.
We can spend a whole post talking about timing (and we probably will!), but for the sake of brevity, we’re going to focus this discussion on the latter point — pairing your product recommendations with the right incentives.
Despite your best merchandising efforts — strategic cross-selling, up-selling, product bundling, etc. — customers may oftentimes still be completely uninterested in or unwilling to add extra items to their carts as they move through the conversion funnel. Take the Order Bump app for example, where we’ve enabled our Shopify Plus merchants to create hyper-specific product relationship rules. Shopify Plus merchants using the Order Bump app are able to set up simple rules using conditional logic that will selectively display certain products based on the items the user already has in his or her shopping cart. This means that the merchants can ensure that product recommendations are always relevant to the customer’s shopping intentions. Checking out with the latest pair of Air Jordan 1 sneakers? Well, this bottle of sneaker cleaner is exactly what you’ll need to keep those Js so fresh and so clean…
Sounds like a great complementary offer, right? It is, but unfortunately no matter how good your recommendations may be, there will still likely be more than a handful of users who will be unmoved by your suggestion. Enter the incentives. Incentives can come in various shapes and sizes, but the ones that we’ve found to perform the best when paired with product cross-sells and up-sells that are presented down the conversion funnel, i.e. checkout, are: free shipping, minimum cart value threshold discounts, tiered pricing discounts, quick (and simple) discounts, and product bundling discounts.
Quick note: Although the general concepts referenced in the remainder of this post apply to merchants operating on e-commerce platforms other than Shopify Plus, the specific techniques suggested apply exclusively to stores on Shopify Plus as Shopify Scripts are used as the primary reference for executing the sales techniques. Furthermore, the Order Bump app for cross-selling and up-selling in checkout is currently only available for Shopify Plus merchants.
Let’s get into it.
- Free shipping.
Example: Buy $X worth of product, and get free shipping
By now, if you’re a moderately successful e-commerce company, you should’ve at least heard of, if not already experimented with free shipping as an incentive for shoppers. In order to effectively motivate users to add cross-sell or up-sell items using free shipping as the carrot, your business must be willing to offer free shipping beyond a certain cart value threshold. You would define the free shipping threshold in terms of total cart value using Shopify scripts, and set up your Order Bump app to up-sell or cross-sell products in checkout that complement other products in your catalog. Whenever a user moves to checkout with an item in his or her cart that you’ve set up a complementary product for, s/he will be presented with the promotional product offer and the free shipping incentive to add it to order. The idea behind leveraging both is that when you present that bottle of sneaker cleaner in checkout, many users will have to make the difficult decision of whether they’re willing to pass up a great complementary product AND free shipping, or do they throw it in the bag and essentially get that extra item for the price of the shipping fees they’d otherwise have to pay. When the prospect of receiving free shipping gets dangled in front of a user in this scenario, it becomes harder to turn down that great complementary product.
2. Minimum ($) threshold discounts.
Example: Buy $X worth of product, and get $Y (or Y%) off
Similar to the free shipping promotion, this type of offer utilizes scripts to detect the user’s total shopping cart value before applying a percent or dollar amount discount (rather than free shipping), if applicable. Just make sure that you recommend up-sell and cross-sell products that, when combined with the parent product, have a total cart value that will surpass the threshold needed to receive a discount.
3. Tiered pricing discounts. There are two types of offers that can be executed using the tiered pricing discounts strategy:
Examples:
1) Buy 1 get 1 for $X (or X%) off
2) Buy X quantity of a product, get $Y or (Y%) off
This type of promotion relies on users adding multiple quantities of the same product or product type to his or her shopping cart and receiving a discount, either percent or dollar amount, as a result. In addition to creating the script that will power the discount, you’ll have to set up up-sell products in Order Bump that correspond to the multiple quantity discount offer you’re running. These tiered pricing discounts work particularly well with products that are habitually used, need frequent replacement or replenishment, and of which users are willing to purchase multiple quantities of e.g. socks.
4. Quick (and simple) discounts.
Example: $X (or X%) off all products with tag Y
There wasn’t a great name for this type of promotion, so bear with us. This is probably the most straightforward type of discount you can apply to a user’s cart using Shopify scripts and Order Bump — you’d simply be discounting the same up-sell or cross-sell product that’s featured in checkout when the user adds the item to his or her shopping cart. The logic behind the script is simple enough, but the key, as it is with the other promotion types listed in the post, is in how you communicate the value proposition to the user when s/he is a few steps away from checking out. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of Order Bump’s marketing copy section that gets displayed to the customer within the checkout widget.
5. Product bundling discounts.
Example: Buy X, Y, and Z, get $W (or W%) off
Lastly, you can also create special promotions for your store that incentivize product bundling or grouping certain products together for purchase. This type of strategy is particularly well suited for merchants who offer a product catalog with lots of complementary items, as they can readily take advantage of natural cross-selling opportunities. Take for example our previous sneaker cleaner and Air Jordan 1 sneakers — these two products are excellent complements and can fit nicely into the product bundling promotion. Using Order Bump, you might try showing the sneaker cleaner product as a cross-sell when the user has Air Jordan 1 sneakers in his or her shopping cart, and offer a discount on orders that bundle the two together. After the user adds the sneaker cleaner to his or her cart, the script would execute the discount that you define on the total cart value. And with Order Bump, you can even extend product bundling beyond just two products by creating additional conditions that trigger cross-sell products to be shown when certain products are already present in the cart, for example: setting up sneaker cleaner as a cross-sell product for Air Jordan 1 sneakers, and shoe laces as a cross-sell product for sneaker cleaner, etc.
Concluding thoughts:
Pro tip: For all the above promotional examples, make sure that you have adequate messaging at customer touch points further up the funnel so that you’re building awareness all along the shopping journey.
Before we wrap, here are three ways you can set up products to show promotional discounts using Order Bump:
- Modify an existing product and apply a price discount using Shopify’s product details — the widget will display both the original price (with a strikethrough) and the new discounted price in bold. Note that this method of applying a product discount does not rely on Shopify scripts, and you will be limited to just discounting the promotional product.
- Duplicate an existing product, set it at a lower price than the original, and hide it from the product catalog. This will make the item, at the promotional price, only visible to users at the checkout step via Order Bump. Note that this method of applying a product discount also does not rely on Shopify scripts, and you will be limited to just discounting the promotional product.
- Set an existing product, at its normal price, as a cross-sell or up-sell product in checkout and use Shopify scripts to apply a price change (either $ or %) after the user adds the promotional product to his or her cart. This tactic offers the most flexibility and allows you to apply discounts to specific items or the entire shopping cart.
With online shopping continuing its rapid growth in the age of face masks and social distancing, you’ll need to tap into different merchandising strategies and selling tactics to stay competitive. Shopify Plus is a robust e-commerce platform that enables merchants of all sizes to execute complex initiatives that relies upon world class technological infrastructure. With an expansive app ecosystem, including apps like Order Bump, you’ll be able to create custom experiences for your store, seamlessly, and often at a fraction of the cost and effort of a competing solution like Magento or BigCommerce.
And when it comes to cross-selling and up-selling solutions, give Order Bump a try today and start experimenting with Shopify scripts to create compelling offers that will boost your store’s average order value and units per transaction.
Have questions about Shopify Plus or Order Bump? Get in touch with us!
Check out this neat DIY Shopify scripts generator that can help you get started with creating discounts based on your store’s promotional needs.
For more information on Shopify scripts directly from Shopify’s documentation resources, check out this link.
