Frequently Bought Together

[habreu]

The Upsell page works pretty well for us as generating additional sales but it has its issues and it is at best able to show 3 or 4 items without overwhelming the customer. It is probably best for 'general' items as when you have associated upsell items for each of several items in your cart it is hit or miss whether they are presented the one extra item they will buy.

So it makes sense to have upsell items on the product page. 'Related Items' are useful but I think the "Frequently Bought Together" feature might be more effective. I'd love to see this added to "Related Items" perhaps with a toggle to 'show Related Items as "frequently bought together" instead' so you can add your related items but if on a particular product it makes more sense to show as "Frequently Bought Together" checking the box would show that block in the "Related Items" block - having both the pages just get too cluttered and there may be times where one makes more sense than the other.

In reading about this feature online some claim that anywhere from 33% to 50% of people will select one or more add-on items with this feature. The key seems to be not only that the products are related or add value but that you add some cheaper step up items - so main product is $50 some people will be okay with an add-on of say $15, many more may be okay with the $5 add-on and a few will go for both.

frequently-bought-together.JPG

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

The main problem with a 'frequently bought together' feature is that, to be effective, you have to have a powerful backend system running it. If this is just "i'm going recommend items that SHOULD be bought with it" AKA "Related Products", then what we really need is an easy way to offer 'bundles'.

I believe there are some add on modules that do this, but I could see the case to make this built in.

[habreu]

You're right. A faux Frequently Bought Together feature would probably work for us to recommend bundles. In fact in our case it might work better as we sell an odd mix and I can see some people would wonder why there are door springs coming up with their paint orders - but a small subset of big customers buy both together frequently enough to skew the results for the average customers who just buy one or the other at a time.

I think - with no empirical data- that the Related Items as we are using them are more passive - somebody buys paint and we show paint remover and paint brushes in the carousel and we do get occasional sales but the Frequently Bought Together is more compelling. It elicits action and provides an easy way to take that action with a click or two in context. The Upsell works the same way but it is divorced from the product page selection process and that would seem to be the best time to get that added.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Well, no one is stopping you from renaming "Related Products" to "Frequently Bought Together" :)

Effectiveness is also a matter of anticipating indent (and probably experimentation). When people buy paint, its easy to assume to show things like 'paint remover' or brushes...might you might find 'drop cloths' getting more upticks. (in other words, things people may NOT think about). For example, I keep forgetting to get one of those "paint can openers" which are extremely handy and cheap. The fact that I can get by using a screwdriver doesn't help. Or, if buying those five gallon buckets, getting a plastic 'spout' for pouring the pain.

Trick would be to A/B test items. (We did this once by adding nine items to the RP List. And only showing 3 out of the nine on a rotating basis based on custom basket field. And then checking the orders databases to see if there was a difference in items ordered -- and yes, laborious).

[habreu]

Hmmm... maybe a hybrid solution would be best then. A way to load preselected items we know will sell (ie from the related items list) and some dynamically generated items from order history? This way you get a few sure items and some of those 'paint can openers.'

You probably could have this run as a scheduled task at off hours and build a static list I assume this would speed things up? I can see where gathering and associating all those items would be a chore but what about if you only were interested in tracking a small set of products? So for example we identify 20 key products and you only track frequently bought items if one of those items is in the basket? Not perfect but possibly more doable? There are a few items - item categories really (paint) that make up the lion's share of our revenue. Then we have another handful of products in two categories that are the highest number of units sold (door hasps and locks) but the per sale total is very much lower. I guess we could benefit from increasing the average $ sale of this second group the most.

Anyway just thinking out loud at this point. It would be a useful feature but I hadn't considered how taxing this might be to the system.

[habreu]

Well I just saw this on the app store and figured I'd mention in case anyone wants to play. I am going to test it on our dev store and see how it works but I appreciate that someone at Miva (Patrick) was listening.

https://apps.miva.com/also-bought-products.html

[oliverands]

The old Emporium Plus Toolkit has the alsobought function available which does this. I've used it in my store for years.

Use alsobought on the INVC page template to keep track of items bought when another product is bought. First create a custom product field in utilities called "alsobought". Then add the token
<mvt:item name="toolkit" param="alsobought|250" />
on the INVC page template at any location, e.g. near the end. The second parameter is any value between 1 and 250. This determines the number of product codes that will be saved. You need to look at the average length of your product codes. For example, if it is 10, then 250 would save about 25 product codes before it started erasing the oldest ones. Keep in mind that customers would probably only want to see 5 or 6 of these also bought product links. So if you wanted 6, then make the number 66 (10 for each product code and 1 for the delimiter between them). Then on the product page, e.g. just below the related products item, you could add the following code. Make sure the custom field alsobought is assigned to the product page in the point and click mode. The system automatically updates the codes as each order is placed. You can also manually edit the custom product field to "tweak" the results.

[habreu]

Thanks. I have that set up. When I saw this I saw 'alsobought' but thought 'frequently bought together' as in my initial post. I thought this might be a step towards that - it may be but still more coding so I'll be waiting a bit longer. :)