The Difference Between Cross-Sells, Up-Sells and Related Products in Magento

Most people who starting using Magento, experience some confusion when it comes to selling additional items in order to get profit from more sales. Usually it is accomplished by means of cross-sells, up-sells and related products. However, there emerges the question what is the difference between them and what to use in this or that situation? First of all, it is worth to mention that cross-sells, up-sells and related products - they all serve to increase the rates of returnings for store owners and offer more convenience for buyers who can decide to buy more or change decision and buy something better instead. In any case, they are sales boosters that prevent client from leaving the page and keep them interested till the process of checkout. So store owners often consider cross- or up-selling and related items as synonyms, but in fact they are separate and different types of selling.

Let’s view each notion and see how they are different.

Up-Sells

These are items that your clients would ideally buy instead of the product they’re viewing. Why you might need that? This way you offer the client to choose the entity of better quality, more popular etc, and as a rule of higher price. Upsells can be viewed directly on the product info page. For example, you would like to buy cell phone and you are viewing the one, you will usually see at the bottom of the page other models with better characteristics and higher price.

Related Products

These are the goods which might be useful for purchaser of selected item. Here may come accessories that are sold additionally, but the buyer can add them to the cart buy in one order. Those goods are usually shown on the same page as the product client is viewing (right column by default). The obvious benefit is that your clients can add the goods to cart along with liked item by simply checking the boxes - no additional viewing and consideration. For example, you are purchasing photo camera and also additionally you might want to drop to cart batteries, memory cards or cases.

Cross-Sells

Basically, considered to be impulse purchases made when the products are already added to cart. Usually they are small items that can be bought without too much thinking, so they should not be very expensive not to push away buyer. The same things as are put near to cash registers at the supermarket when you can add some small items and buy them without any preset plans. For better visualization here is also comparative table of these sales notions based upon criteria they can be differentiated:

Criteria	Upsell	Cross-Sell	Related Product
Where can be viewed	product page	in cart	product page (right column)
Price comparing to original product	higher	usually low-cost items	it depends
products purchased in addition to selected	no, bought instead	yes, added to the ones in the cart	yes, added to cart

Need to assign cross-sells, up-sells and related items to Magento products in bulk? Check this tutorial with explanation on how to import the mentioned details and example of file format -