A great opportunity for revenue growth and an easy way to extract the highest return on ad spend is by increasing the value of each order by a small percentage. This can be accomplished by promoting cross sells and up sells during checkout.

There are a couple of ways to do this, you can either manually set up cross sells in your ecommerce system or you can outsource personalized recommendations to a company like MyBuys or Certona.

In-House/Manual Recommendations

Most shopping cart/ecommerce systems will allow you to add related items to each product. Promoting cross sells manually can also be great if you have the product knowledge and know exactly what to recommend. Although this is a manual process, it is great for offering recommendations for smaller ecommerce sites that can’t afford to outsource recommendations.

Third-Party Recommendations

If you have a large ecommerce site with thousands of SKUs, it is very hard to manually recommend related products on a per product basis. By using a third party partner to generate recommendations from your aggregate customer purchase history, you can make this process much easier and more intelligent.

Most third party recommendation providers work off of a percentage based commission model. You would pay a commission on all items purchased specifically from their recommendation engine.