8 tactics to smarten your cart and boost post-purchase upsells

Both ‘smart cart’ and ‘post-purchase’ / ‘aftersell’ apps have made quite a splash in the Shopify ecosystem (and beyond) recently. 

So much so, in fact, that Shopify itself announced its acquisition of Checkout Blocks (a vendor in the space focussing solely on the checkout part of upselling) and began offering it free with every Shopify Plus license. 

Essentially, these ‘smart cart’ and ‘post-purchase’ technologies are designed to upsell shoppers when buying intent is at its highest, and are neatly integrated into ecommerce platforms. 

What you might not know, however, is that Nosto’s integrated Commerce Experience Platform can help brands deliver exactly what can be achieved through these specialist apps—and a whole lot more. 

Who do ‘smart cart’ and ‘post-purchase’-type apps work best for?

Before we dive into some examples of how our clients are using Nosto to deliver these smarter cart / post-purchase-type experiences, we wanted to highlight what types of brands would most benefit from these:

• Brands with low SKU counts, for whom upselling needs to be extremely targeted, such as Food & Beverage 
• Brands where repeat purchases are very unlikely, thus immediate upselling is the only way to drive higher customer retention and CLV
• Brands with low AOVs and/or higher fulfillment costs
• Any vertical where bundling products makes sense 

Now, let’s talk tactics….

Building a smarter cart for upsells

Firstly, let’s take a look at the cart itself. This is a key space for brands to highlight alternative items to what’s in the cart and encourage upsells. 

Take our client, Buffalo Jeans, for example. They use Nosto’s enhanced cart cross-selling approach to do exactly this. We especially love the format Buffalo Jeans has chosen: a cart slider as a hovering full product recommendation widget. Very neat.

Notably, brands using Nosto can layer in advanced merchandising rules depending on their goals. For example, they might want to only highlight more expensive items than that in the cart, or solely push products with a high inventory. Brands can also choose to cross-sell complementary items, or tie the cart value to a free shipping threshold. 

Taking it one step further: the suggested products can even be tied to onsite segments such as VIP segments, or even third-party loyalty platform tiers to get even more granular and say, highlight exclusive items (all using using Nosto’s Audience Builder or our Shopify Flow integration).

Offering a ‘free gift with purchase’ (FGWP) 

Next on our list is Nosto client, NEST New York—the top address for perfume, diffusers, and candles. To inspire their shoppers’ next purchase, and leave a memory trace long after conversion, shoppers can add free perfume samples during checkout. 

We love how Nest New York is showing a free shipping threshold bar at the top of the cart drawer as well as ‘You may also like’ complementary cross-sell recommendations. Note how the recommendations and gift offers can be shown and hidden so as to not overbear the user. 

Taking it one step further: brands can offer additional free samples and tie the quantity of these attainable to a shopper’s cart value. 

Utilizing dynamic links

Next, we look at dynamic links. By this, we mean using links that take shoppers to specific landing pages that can be set up to engage them on an individual or segment basis. 

Whether they’re to welcome influencer-driven traffic with a custom message, give VIP customers that land from SMS the red carpet treatment, or trigger geolocation-based experiences, Nosto’s got you covered. 

Take the example of our client, Champion. Their email-sourced, VIP segment traffic is shown an early access sale homepage banner that gives them the ability to shop their sale before everyone else. 

Taking it one step further: brands can also use Nosto’s weather-based targeting to create highly relevant landing pages that also consider a shopper’s current and predicted weather conditions. For example, an apparel brand might show rain jackets or boots to a shopper with rainy local weather conditions

Incorporating dynamic bundles 

The likes of fashion and homeware brands in particular love curating sets, and Nosto customers can make use of its Dynamic Bundles module to do so. 

To inspire the purchase of multiple garments at once, Nosto client, Favorite Daughter, leverages fully automated bundle generation. These leverage Nosto’s smart algorithms to recommend product groupings, saving their team that extra leg work.

Taking it one step further: Brands can choose to manually merchandise bundles for some products while leaving the AI to automate the others. The choice is yours.

Curating post-purchase & reorder landing pages 

Nosto is all about post-purchase experiences that seamlessly integrate a follow-up purchase opportunity into the first conversion. 

We love how Natural Life has incorporated a Nosto reorder experience into their shopping flow, as captured below. This makes it easy for shoppers to purchase the same item over and over. Since the Natural Life team realized many of their products are so beloved and continuously reordered, this was a no-brainer. 

Beyond these ‘buy-it-again’-type recommendations, Nosto can trigger post-purchase cross-sell suggestions on both the ‘Thank you’ page (upon order completion), as well as the actual checkout page. Ask us about checkout extensibility support on Shopify!

Taking it one step further: Think post-purchase stops at the thank you page or an order follow-up email? Think again. Nosto customers can also deploy order-related product recommendations on the homepage or landing pages to returning customers. A seamless shopping experience that encourages further purchases and builds brand loyalty. Bravo!

Encouraging add-ons within PDPs

Cross-selling on product display pages (PDPs) can take many flavors. For health and beauty brands, creating an entire skincare regimen that allows users to check out all items within one click is the way to go. 

Our favorite brand, Pixi Beauty, does just that. In fact, not only do they make it super easy to check out, but they also incorporate color swatches of their products into the recommendation template. This removes the necessity of a shopper having to navigate to the product’s PDP to explore or select a desired variant. 

Taking it one step further: brands can also use Nosto UGC’s shop-the-look feature to show recommended items in their natural environment and incorporate that golden social proof.

Cross-selling via pop-ups

Interestingly, triggering a pop-up to offer cross-sells or upsells can, in some scenarios, outperform standard product recommendations. 

Nosto client, Bare Minerals, for example, wanted to trigger a ‘welcome back’ message to previous visitors, highlighting items they’d previously added to cart, in addition to anything they’d heavily viewed before. The result? Users feel understood and welcomed back and therefore convert at a faster rate. 

Taking it one step further: Nosto pop-ups can be triggered by a multitude of criteria associated with hesitant shopper behavior, high-intent prospects, or existing customers. They can show after a user’s viewed a certain number of PDPs, after they’ve visited specific pages, are showing exit intent, and a whole lot more.

That’s a wrap

We hope this article has filled you with inspiration for how you can level up to a smarter cart and influence post-purchase behavior that leaves positive post-purchase experiences and, ultimately, improves customer satisfaction.

If you’re interested in hearing how you could implement any of the above tactics and what would be the most performant setups for you, then get in touch:

• Nosto clients: your Customer Success Manager will be happy to help
• All other folks: reach out to our sales team today