The 5 best upsell apps for D2C

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Upsell apps usually combine a few functions: Upsells, cross-sells, down-sells and product recommendations. Though each tool will have its own secret sauce, upselling generally means adding a callout on your site to prompt a customer to add another larger version of the same item to their order (for example: Upsell a customer from a one off purchase to a subscription). Cross-selling means prompting a customer to add another relevant item to their order (for example: If they're looking at underwear, maybe promote some socks to add). And then down-selling happens when a customer rejects an upsell offer, and you offer them a secondary offer.

Upsell tools usually pay for themselves very quickly. So I recommend you seriously consider investing in one. I've handpicked the 5 best tools in this (in no particular order): 

1. Honeycomb
2. Rebuy
3. Checkout Promotions
4. Carthook
5. Aftersell

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Honeycomb

Brief summary: 

Brought to you from Eyal and Jonathan - Honeycomb is one app of 12 in the Conversion Bear lineup. Honeycomb’s mission is to be the go-to app for Upsells and Cross-Sells across the entire customer journey. They’ve done well so far - With almost 400 5 Star reviews and a star studded D2C customer base lineup, it’s one you should absolutely consider. 

Product wise you create “funnels” - you’ve got 6 types of funnels available to you: 

1. Product page 
2. Cart page
3. Checkout page
4. Post Purchase
5. Thank you page
6. Blog
   

Those are really just placements for your upsell offers to show. They show up in a similar format across placements, except for the “checkout page” & “thank you page” placement. See screenshots below. 

What’s neat about Honeycomb is the fact that you can create many different upsell & crossell experiments to figure out what works best for your business. The way Chubbies leverages Honeycomb may very well differ from the way you use it. And if you just wanted to sit back and let the AI figure it out - you could do that too, Honeycomb has that feature. 

What’s more is that you have full control of the design in a simple WYSIWYG editor and you can even geek out further by adding scripts for facebook ads or other, and further customize the layout & design with custom Javascript. 

2 more really really cool features: 
Custom fields: You can add custom fields to your offers so that your customers can customize their product that they’re adding to their cart. For example: If you want to offer a bracelet with custom engraving as an upsell - you can show that offer and the customer will have the option to enter their desired engraving directly within your popup. 

Recharge integration: Honeycomb integrates natively with Recharge. So if a customer has purchased a one off item, you can upsell them to a subscription offering. Very powerful. 

All of that + a 12 hour / day live chat customer support. Not too shabby!

What it looks like: 

Used by # of brands: 21

Notable D2Cs: 

• Proper
• Chubbies
• Jot
  

Key differentiators: 

• Integrates with their full suite + ReCharge
• Custom fields to customize upsell offers
• Upsell, Crossell & Downsell - all within one app
• 6 different placements
  

Pricing:

The pricing is based on “funnel views”. A funnel view is defined as any time your customer views an offer from Honeycomb. For 2,000 funnel views - it costs $49/month. Assuming a 10% order rate from seeing the offer, that’s get you 200 orders. 

Rebuy

Brief summary: 

Rebuy takes upsells & cross sells in a different direction than a lot of the apps listed here. 

It’s slightly more focused on the buying journey than the checkout and post-purchase experiences. And Rebuy works with “widgets” that get embedded into your store, as opposed to popups as is the case for many apps mentioned in this post. With widgets, you can bring upsell / cross sell / personalisation functionality natively in your store: Just configure their UI and their rules (show widget if XYZ conditions are met) and you’re good to go. No devs needed. 

One caveat: Rebuy does offer pop ups too & checkout +  thank you page upsells as shown in the examples - But those are features that are slightly less shouted about by the team. 

The core Rebuy feature set impacts the homepage experience, the product page experience and the cart page in meaningful ways. Let’s drive into each one:  

On the homepage, Rebuy can pick up your users’ location as well as whether or not they’re a customer. Based on those parameters - you can customise the experience to (for example) say “Welcome back Tim!”

On the product detail page, you can significantly improve your product recommendations using a combination of rules + AI. For example, Rebuy works with Patagonia and they’ve set up some of their PDPs to match product recommendations based on collection. So if you’re looking at mountain climbing shoes, you may be shown a helmet - as opposed to another SKU of shoes. The cool thing here is that you can easily turn on the AI engine that reccommends products based on historical product sales data + click behaviour on those recommendations. That’s been a game changer for Patagonia and many others. 

And then finally, there’s the mini-cart. This is the hero feature of Rebuy - you can natively add an upsell widget (which is just a div) in your cart experience - and then you can overlay rules on top of your widget to show the right offers to the right people. This is the money-maker for many D2Cs using Rebuy - because the upsell offer is presented at the right stage of the funnel, and natively. 

What it looks like: 

Used by # of brands: 106

Notable D2Cs: 

• Our Place
• Jambys
• Baboon
  

Key differentiators: 

• Looks native to the shopping experience
• Personalization across multiple areas of the funnel (from homepage to thank you page)
• One app to do more than 1 job: Ex: Product Recommendations via AI
  

Pricing:

$4.49 + $0.09/order (So $23/mo if you’re doing 200 orders a month)

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Checkout Promotions

Brief summary: 

Brought to you by longtime Shopify developer and advocate, Gil Greenberg - Checkout Promotions is another app that’s popular among successful D2Cs. 

What makes Checkout Promotions attractive is really 2 features: 

1. Trigger flexibility
2. Design flexibility
   

Trigger flexibility: Most upsell apps show offers based on simple triggers such as “user added T-shirt to basket”, but if you’re going to show compelling offers that have a high conversion rate, you want to be a lot more prescriptive than that. That’s where Checkout Promotions’ 20 upsell parameters come in handy. For example - you can choose to trigger an offer only if a certain discount code has been used, or customer is within XYZ country, or based on the customer tag. 

Design flexibility: Once you’ve selected when and where you want your offer to trigger, you can customize the way the offer shows. You have access to a drag and drop editor, and you can add custom blocks such as simple text, spacing, products, a countdown & more. You can even add reviews to further enhance the credibility of the upsell product you’re showcasing. The reviews are pulled in via direct integrations to your favorite review platform (from Loox, to Stamped, Junip and Okendo).

What’s worth noting is that you have less “upsell” placements available here than on other apps such as Honeycomb - but that’s intentional. The app isn’t meant to be used to further crowd your experience with popups, instead it’s used to further complement existing pages you’re on - such as the Post Purchase page or Thank You page. 

Coming soon are extra integrations to subscription platforms, and in 2022 you will get access to downsell functionality, A/B testing and a lot more. Stay tuned! 

What it looks like: 

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Used by # of brands: 6

Notable D2Cs: 

• Tentree
• Hydrant
• Stryx
  

Key differentiators: 

• Offer Trigger flexibility (+20 parameters to choose from)
• Design flexibility (drag and drop blocks)
  

Pricing:

‍$15/mo + $0.02/funnel view (So $55/mon if you’ve got 200 orders a month - and a 10% conversion rate from funnel view to purchase). 

Carthook

Brief summary: 

Similarly to Checkout Promotions - Carthook is laser focused on one upsell placement: “Post-purchase”. That’s the new step between the “checkout” and the “thank you” page. Basically - Shopify captures your order and then holds your credit card details so that you can be upsold onto a new product before you see your thank you page. 
The difference between Carthook & Checkout Promotions is that Checkout Promotions does also offer a “Thank you” page upsell placement. The tricky thing here is that, as a customer, you’d have to re-enter your credit card details in order to purchase a good from that “Thank You” page. 

But back to Carthook - It’s got a super clean UI, great upsell offer criterias, a powerful subscription integration, a downsell offering and strong design flexibility. 

Clean UI: Carthook’s an OG in the Shopify app system. They’ve been around for 5 years and this isn’t their first app. So the Shopify admin experience is extremely intuitive. 

Offer criterias: They offer highly sophisticated display offer criterias. So for example, as a merchant - you can choose to show an offer based on cart contents, or on order value or even based on the cart item count. You can mix & match any of these rules.

Subscription: Upselling from a single purchase to a subscription offering is a very powerful offer type. And not every tool provides this. Carthook integrates with every subscription platform, from ReCharge to Skio, Smartrr and Upscribe.  

Downsell offers: If someone either accepts or rejects your post-purchase offer, you can show another offer after that. Don’t want discounted socks? How about a discounted beanie? Or you accepted my discount t-shirt - how about some shorts with that?

Design flexibility: The WYSIWYG editor here is clean and powerful. Carthook automatically pulls in your design assets from your checkout settings and instantly creates a branded post-purchase offer design that matches your brand. But you can add testimonials to that, more imagery etc - you’ve got many blocks to choose from. 

From the Carthook research: You’ll get a 15-20% acceptance rate on your offers, and you’ll drive an extra 10% in revenue from having it live on site. 

What it looks like: 

Used by # of brands: 9

Notable D2Cs: 

• Four Sigmatic
• HVMN
• Magic Spoon
  

Key differentiators: 

• Excellent UI and design flexibility
• Upsell to subscription is neatly integrated
  

Pricing:

‍ $50/month + 1% of post-purchase revenue (So if you’re doing 200 orders with an AOV of $50 - you’d be looking at $150/month total)

Aftersell

Brief summary: 

Caught up with Dhruv, co-founder of Aftersell to get a great demo of the product. Aftersell’s focus is on post-purchase - similar to Checkout Promotions and Carthook. Meaning you’ll only see the upsell offers in the checkout stage and on the thank you page. 

The Aftersell app is loved on Shopify by over 250 brands (4.9 star rating) and I get it. The UI is extremely intuitive:
Step 1: Create a “funnel” for your upsell offer

Here you choose when your offer will be shown. For example: As a merchant you can say something like “only show my offer when cart value is xyz” or “only show my offer if product Z is in cart”. 

Step 2: Design the offer

You’ve got access to a powerful block editor that enables you to customize the look and feel of your offer. Maybe you add a product image, maybe you add long-form text etc. At the end of October 2021, you’ll also be able to pull in reviews of those products from your favorite apps. 

Step 3: Decide when it shows 

Here you’ve got a few different options. You can choose a secondary offer to show after your customer has either accepted or refused your first offer (“downsell”) - but then you also have the capability to decide whether your offer should ALSO show on the thank you page. By default, your offer will show at the “Checkout” stage (in between cart and thank you pages) - but you can also show offers on your thank you page. The neat thing here is that you can choose to NOT show the thank you page offer on first impression - but instead show it on future visits of that page (for ex: if your customer comes back to check on shipping). 
One final super cool feature: FAQs. Yeah it’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but your thank you page gets visited on average 3 times - and that’s because customers are curious about their order / delivery status. You can add FAQ’s on your thank you page to answer those queries and alleviate your customer support team from being drowned in WISMO (where is my order) tickets.
It’s the most affordable of the bunch mentioned, but you don’t get access to features (yet) that might be useful to you such as: Upselling to a subscription or having upsell placements before the checkout.  

What it looks like: 

Used by # of brands: 6

Notable D2Cs: 

• Ministry of Supply
• Vibe
• Doe
  

Key differentiators: 

• The FAQ capability is very unique
• The UI is extremely intuitive
• Pricing is quite affordable

Pricing:

$29/mo if you’re doing 200 orders a month. 

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So that's it - here are the 5 best upsell apps, just pick the one that best suits your needs from the list above!

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-Tim