Shoreline 2 review for Cross Sell & Upsell by SSC
Jan. 18, 2016
When considering a cross sell / upsell app, you have to decide which is more valuable to you—automation or manual control. Nearly every recommendation app on Shopify takes an automated approach. This means you can install it and forget it, but you have to trust that the recommendations are going to be good ones. The automated apps (I’ve installed and tried nearly all of them) all claim to use BIG DATA, some sort of secret-sauce algorithm that magically determines what your customers will want to click on. And they make you pay for it: Expect to pay a minimum of $40/month for that magic formula. You know what? Big Data is overrated. We installed a bunch of apps in succession, only because most looked awful on our site and they kept giving the same lousy recommendations. We finally settled on a single app, just to see if it could learn our customer behavior. This app was by far the best of the automated apps that we installed. Nevertheless, in 6 months of reporting, we found that over 90% of clicks from recommendations were just products from the same collection. There’s no programming magic in that, no secret sauce, and no Big Data—our theme (Retina) already has this built in. There’s really no point in paying $50/month for that. So how do you get recommendations that are actually interesting and useful and generate additional sales? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. And this means manually selecting your recommendations. Enter Cross Sell. It does not (yet) have an automated algorithm to guess the best possible recommendations, but for only $7/month, who cares? We don’t have 20,000 SKUs, and it’s easy enough to pick our 100 best sellers and add manual recommendations that we know will keep customers clicking and buying. Yes, some of those will be from the same collection, but many will not, and we know after 20 years in business which recommendations are best. For all the rest, Cross Sell lets you choose a default set of recommendations, and there’s also a separate Shopping Cart set of recommendations. Their shopping cart is about to get a lot smarter, too, pulling from the manual recommendations you’ve already assigned to the products in your cart. A few last points: • Automated / Big Data recommendations change as they gather more data. But in every single case that we observed (we monitored about 30 products closely), the changes were for the WORSE. Cross-Sell's manual approach prevents this. • Cross Sell's manual approach lets you choose your own marketing priorities: Do you simply want to highlight accessories that will increase total cart value? Or do you want to highlight new products? Perhaps you want to point customers to lesser-known products? Automated apps don't let you choose. • Cross Sell integrates seamlessly into your Shopify theme—at least for now, their support team will do this for you for free. You’d be surprised how few of the high-dollar recommendation / upsell apps actually play nice with your CSS. • Don’t underestimate the value of speedy load times. All the automated apps I tried (including the one I stuck with for many months) had SLOOOOW load times. With so many users on mobile, the slow-loading upsell apps were a real drag. Because Cross Sell uses a fixed set of recommendations, and doesn’t have to calculate new ones with each page load, it loads as fast as your original content. The support at Cross Sell is the best I've ever received for an app less than $10/month. Steve and Stuart are dedicated pros. Get this app.
