Cross-selling is commonly used in retail to get someone who is buying a product to buy another product relevant to the one that they are going to buy. An example would be trying to sell someone who is buying a gift, a greeting card too or recommending a person buying a coffee a cake and coffee deal.
What people tend to do is put near items that sell well, a sign or the items that people tend to buy with those items
But there’s one small catch
You have to know what items do have a decent cross-sell results
Let’s find out
You will find one here in the Sales report in your POS software under "Category Companion Sales by Period"
Once you click on that it will then take you to another screen which lets you select the dates and the item or category that you wish to check.
I suggest you do it by a department but if you are doing it by item, make sure that it is a good selling item because it is not worth your trouble if the items do not sell well. For example, if an item sells 5 a year and has a cross-sell rate of 20% that is one sale, so it is probably not worth it to do any rearranging but if an item sells 15 a week and has a rate of 10% cross-sell then that is at least one to two extra sales a week.
Now run this report with a decent period, here I used a year, but if you are looking at seasonal or holiday items eg father day you may want to look at this period last year. What you get is a list of items and categories that sell well with what you specified.
Now make it happen
To pick up more sales what you have to make sure of is that these cross-sell items are clearly visible to your customers looking at the items.
You will find that this is a great way to pick up additional sales.
