Overview

The UP-SELL WPO is about offering similar, up-selling, and cross-selling personalized product recommendations on your PDP (Product Detail Page).

If you are not familiar with WPOs, Customer Journey Steps, WPO Levels, Widgets, or Page layouts, please read the introduction: Widget & Page Optimizers (WPO)

Purpose

Conversion Optimization

Decision Support in the evaluation
Up-sell
Margin optimization
Sales
Assortment clarification

How should the widgets appear visually?

The UP-SELL widgets typically are displayed with a label (title) on top and a slider or product recommendations (with left and right arrows) as documented as “product slider” in the https://boxalino.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BPKB/pages/57671688/Check-list+empower+your+Website+Layout+with+Narratives#Layout-Blocks-(Templates)-Check-list. There might be several blocks on the page, one below each other, or in different sections of the page.

Key focus: relevance to the main product

The relevance with the main product of the PDP is important here, especially for online marketing campaign visitors landing on the PDP. Therefore, instead of “simply” showing manually defined accessories or the top-selling product of the product’s category, you can offer a meaningful logic of what makes other products good alternatives (similar products) or good cross-selling options.

It might be confusing why we speak about cross-selling in this WPO while there is another WPO called “CROSS-SELL”. The reason is that the UP-SELL WPO covers all the widgets appearing on the PDP directly, while the CROSS-SELL WPO covers all widgets appearing on the basket page on an overlay after the user clicks on the add-to-basket button.

Related WPOs

The UP-SELL WPO belongs to the EVALUATION customer journey step (third column of the diagram above) and corresponds to LEVEL 1 as it is solely about products and not other types of content: combine it with READ to also support recommendations of other types of content like banners or blog articles and use it within a smart, personalized and dynamic layout with PERSUADE.

What widgets should you consider?

One or several product recommendations blocks, each with a specific label, can be integrated.

Each block can display the products in a slider or in a grid (the number of products per block is not limited but is typically less than 20). The number of blocks is also not limited and will be returned in a sequence by our API. Combine it with PERSUADE to retrieve a dynamic personalized list of blocks embedded in a complete page layout (including other visual blocks for banners, information messages, emotional pictures, … all of which can be also personalized and A/B tested). As an example of such a case, here is a use case with Marketing Topics: Personalized Marketing Automation on Qualipet Homepage

WPO Optimization Strategies

The Widget strategy can be configured in the Widget Strategy Editor and supports all the standard Strategy Use-Cases.

Here is a selection from our Best Practice Strategies in 3 sections (what to configure before your go-live, what could be your first A/B test about and more advanced practices for later stages).

1. What to start with (for the go-live)?

	Group	Name	Short description
1	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Similar Product Attributes	Promote products of the same category, brand and other key attributes as the main product of the PDP
2	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Same Price Range	Promote products within the same price range (e.g.: 75% - 125%) as the main product of the PDP
3	Product & Content Statistics (PCS)	Smart Bestsellers	Best-selling trends, top recently generating revenue / margin products, often contributing to higher AOV, …
4	Product & Content Attributes (PCA)	Exclude Ineffective Products Exclude Ineffective Product Groups	Remove out-of-stock products, as well as zero or low-value products, low margin, or any other unwanted products (the second practice considers the 1st or 2nd most sold sku of each product group, for example to exclude products which top sold variant(s) are currently out of stock)
5	Product & Content Attributes (PCA)	Value Flags	Promote products or content with valuable value flags (5 stars, best-seller, novelties, recent discounts, staff pick of the week, …)
6	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Exclude Products already in the basket	Exclude products that are already in the basket of the visitor

2. What could be a/b tested first?

All the elements of the “What to start with?” list could also be used in a/b testing. The list here-after provides additional Best Practices that can be quickly tried.

	Group	Name	Short description
1	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Discovery Tags Context Products > Defining Tags	Promote products or content with Discovery Tags matching the main product of the PDP. Each product gets a list of Discovery Tags representing the most common search terms used to find a product. Each product gets a list of Defining Tags representing which is a subset of the product attributes values that have been identified as important in the selection of a product
2	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > End-up Buying	Products which are often bought in the same session after viewing the main product of the PDP
3	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Value Flags	Promote products or content with the same valuable value flags as the main product of the PDP (5 stars, best-seller, novelties, recent discounts, staff pick of the week, …)
4	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Often Bought/Viewed/Basketed Together Context Products > Collaborative Filtering Bought/Viewed/Basketed Together	Promote products often bought together with the main product of the PDP (alternative with viewed in same session and added to the basket in same session) (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
5	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Often Viewed in Same Session Context Products> Collaborative Filtering Viewed Same Session	Promote products often viewed in the same session as the main product of the PDP (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
6	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Low/High End	Promote products or content in the same Price Quadrant as the main product of the PDP. Each product is connected to a price percentile according to its group (e.g.: category), lower percentiles (e.g.: <20%) are labeled Low-End while top percentiles (e.g.. >80%) are labeled High-End.
7	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Viewed Category, Brands & Landing Pages Used Facets Values Used Price Range Previous Search(es) Related Search(es)	Promote products matching the viewed top product-listing pages (category pages, brand pages, campaign landing pages, …) used facets values or price range (search / product listing filtering options) slightly higher price range than previously used prior searches (or related to the prior searches) of the visitor.
8	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Product Attributes	Promote products or content with attribute values matching previously viewed products
9	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Product Attributes	Promote products or content with attribute values matching previously bought products
10	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Exclude Recently Purchased Products	Exclude products the customer has recently purchased
11	Product & Content Statistics (PCS)	Product Views & Engagement Trends	Most viewed or baskested items within different time frames
12	Product & Content Statistics (PCS)	Widget Display $Value Self-Learning	Promote products based on the self-learning of the Widget click/display score, either directly on the amount of clicks or on the conversion, average bought value or margin generated by the clicks Display = visual impression detected on the screen of the user before, during and after scrolling on the page
13	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Segmented Widget Display $Value Self-Learning > Context Products Segmented Widget Display $Value Self-Learning > Context Products Attribute	Promote products based on the self-learning of the Widget click/display score segmented per context products or attributes, either directly on the amount of clicks or on the conversion, average bought value or margin generated by the clicks Display = visual impression detected on the screen of the user before, during and after scrolling on the page
14	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Rebuyable products	Promote products the customer has already bought which can be repurchased Each product can be automatically labelled as rebuyable if enough people bought it several time, or if it belongs to a category you know to be rebuyable or doesn’t belong to any category which you know to be not-rebuyable .

3. What else could be experimented with?

Expand the list to see all the additional Best Practices of this WPO.

Other Best Practices

	Group	Name	Short description
1	Marketing Alignment (MA)	Promoted Campaigns	Promote products or content in the target of active promoted campaigns
2	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Price Range	Products which match (or are slightly higher than) the products price range of the previsouly viewed products
3	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > End-up Buying	Products which are often bought in the same session after viewing the same products the current visitor has already viewed
4	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Discovery Tags Views > Defining Tags	Promote products or content with Discovery Tags matching previously viewed products. Each product gets a list of Discovery Tags representing the most common search terms used to find a product. Each product gets a list of Defining Tags representing which is a subset of the product attributes values that have been identified as important in the selection of a product
5	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Individual Collaborative Filtering	Neural Collaborative Filtering for individual recommendations based on the purchases of the customer and leveraging the patterns in the purchase behaviors of other customers
6	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Basket > Often Bought Together Basket > Collaborative Filtering Bought Together	Promote products often bought together with products already in the basket of the visitor (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
7	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Often Bought Together Views > Collaborative Filtering Bought Together	Promote products often bought together with products the visitor has already viewed (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
8	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Often Viewed in Same Session Views > Collaborative Filtering Viewed Same Session	Promote products often viewed in the same session as products the visitor has already viewed (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
9	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Last Purchase > Often Bought After Last Purchase > Collaborative Filtering Bought After	Promote products often bought after the last purchase of the customer (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
10	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Often Bought By the Same Customer Purchases > Collaborative Filtering Bought By the Same Customer	Promote products often bought by the same customer (based on the purchase history of the customer) (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
11	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Basket > Often Basketed Together Basket > Collaborative Filtering Basketed Together	Promote products often basketed together with products already in the basket of the visitor (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
12	Product & Content Context (PCC)	Context Products > Often Basketed Together Context Products > Collaborative Filtering Basketed Together	Promote products often basketed together with the main product of the PDP (first practice with statistics, second variant with AI Collaborative Filtering)
13	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Low/High End	Promote products or content in the same Price Quadrant as previously viewed products. Each product is connected to a price percentile according to its group (e.g.: category), lower percentiles (e.g.: <20%) are labeled Low-End while top percentiles (e.g.. >80%) are labeled High-End.
14	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Low/High End	Promote products or content in the same Price Quadrant as previously bought products. Each product is connected to a price percentile according to its group (e.g.: category), lower percentiles (e.g.: <20%) are labeled Low-End while top percentiles (e.g.. >80%) are labeled High-End.
15	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Discovery Tags Purchases > Defining Tags	Promote products or content with Discovery Tags matching previously bought products. Each product gets a list of Discovery Tags representing the most common search terms used to find a product. Each product gets a list of Defining Tags representing which is a subset of the product attributes values that have been identified as important in the selection of a product.
16	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Wish-list > Products Wish-list > Products Attributes Wish-list > Products Discovery Tags Wish-list > Products Defining Tags	Promote products currently in the wish-list of the visitor matching the values of attributes of products in the wish-list of the visitor matching the Discovery/Defining Tags of products in the wish-list of the visitor See Discovery and Defining Tags definition above
17	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Basket > Products Attributes Basket > Products Discovery Tags Basket > Products Defining Tags	Promote products matching the values of attributes of products in the basket of the visitor matching the Discovery/Defining Tags of products in the basket of the visitor See Discovery and Defining Tags definition above
18	Visitor Journey Personalization (VJP)	Views > Smart Bestsellers on Clustering	Best-selling trends within the Cluster the visitor is predicted to belong based on his prior product views. Customer Clustering distributes all customers into clusters based on their purchase history
19	Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)	Purchases > Smart Bestsellers on Clustering	Best-selling trends within the Cluster the customer belongs. Customer Clustering distributes all customers into clusters based on their purchase history

Additional ideas for Widget Strategies

Change the label of your blocks depending on the content of the recommendations (e.g.: “Often bought with” versus “Suitable with”)
Segmented personalization (based on the visitor’s traffic source, device, etc.), also for the layout (traffic coming from Google Shopping could see the similar product recommendations at the very top as they need to see if there are any relevant alternatives)
Consider at least 2 blocks to separate similar and cross-selling recommendations and display the similar recommendations first (also you can either separate the block “accessories” from “often bought with” or group them into one)

Onboarding project plan

Here are our suggestions for the project management steps of the UP-SELL widgets.

This process described how to integrate the UP-SELL WPO by itself without any other WPO combined. if you want to integrate the UP-SELL together with other WPOs, contact Boxalino to discuss an adequate project plan.

	Task	Description	Comment
1	Pre-requisites	Make sure the Pre-requisites steps are completed and already deployed in production Data exports Tracker integration	Exports for products and transactions are required, as well as all the standard tracking events.
2	Pages	Define the pages where the UP-SELL widgets will be integrated (typically consider simply all your Product Detail Pages)	Example: Product Detail Page
3	Widgets	Define the UP-SELL widgets to be integrated on each page and where they should appear on the page (if you decide that some widgets should not appear for all visitors, define the logic deciding when they will appear or not)	Example names: similar complementary accessories related
4	Labels	Define the label of each of the UP-SELL widgets in each language (the title that appears on top of the product slider)	Examples: Similar products Often bought with Accessories Other people also bought/like
5	Integrate API + Configuration	Integrate Boxalino Narrative API and configure your widgets in the Boxalino Admin. Layout Blocks of the templates (typically 2 templates: product slider (container) and product (for each product display) as documented as “product slider” in the https://boxalino.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BPKB/pages/57671688/Check-list+empower+your+Website+Layout+with+Narratives#Layout-Blocks-(Templates)-Check-list Widgets strategies with one use case* in the UP-SELL WPO in Boxalino Admin with the exact names defined in step 3 A narrative defining the layout of widgets (with positions if separated zones) referring to the names of the widgets as accessors and with the labels defined in step 4	As a result, you should be able to see the widgets appear in your dev/stage front-end showing valid products of the same category but without any other relevant logic in the selection of the products. If you display widgets in separated zones of the page, you can use different positions so the widgets are grouped by positions in the Narrative API response
6	Configure Widget Strategies	Complete the strategy of each of the UP-SELL widgets (first in prose and then by configuring the widget in the Boxalino Admin)	Boxalino can support you for the configuration of the widget strategies
7	Test & Deploy	Testing in your dev/stage environment and go-live	In case you have a separate prod and a stage account, make sure to copy your configuration in production before going live

* for the initial configuration of your widget, make sure to configure the similar category use-case described in the Integration notes: Widgets configuration.

Integration notes

Pre-requisites: Data exports (products, transactions, and optionally customer data) and Boxalino Tracker integration.
Widgets configuration: you can simply copy the following JSON and import it in your Widget Strategy configuration (it will allow you to see products of the same category which will allow you to validate that the items you provide in your API request are working correctly).
Boxalino Narrative should be configured in Boxalino’s admin on the first appearing widget on the page (which should be the one called in the API request). The Narrative should define the layout of all the widgets (name of the widget to be indicated in the accessor parameter possibly with a hitCount to define how many products should be returned, for example: “topsellers[hitCount=15]”) as well as the labels.
Boxalino Narrative API will return a list of blocks (for each block of product recommendations) each with a list of sub-blocks (with the list of products) as documented here, (make sure to make only one call to our API to retrieve all widgets and not a call per widget which would cause poorer speed performance on your frontend)
The products returned will always include the product ids (which might be all you need) and other product fields can be returned as well if requested in the API calls (see Return Fields)
The request and the response should not be cached (consider an AJAX call in case you need to cache some parts of your page for performance reasons).
Make sure to tag your HTML with the required classes and entities returned by Boxalino as bx-attributes so the Boxalino tracker can identify automatically the scrolling behavior (including the appearance of the products when using the slider arrows).
Before going live, make sure to control the Tracker Checklist

Widgets Configuration Use Case - Similar Categories (copy and import in widget editor)

[
  {
    "useCaseModelSource": "library",
    "useCaseModelId": 20,
    "useCaseModelVersion": 1,
    "useCaseModelSubVersion": 1,
    "name": "Same Product Attributes",
    "order": "8",
    "orGroup": null,
    "fromIndex": -1,
    "toIndex": -1,
    "maxWeight": null,
    "variant": "",
    "scope": "local",
    "overwriteLevel": 1,
    "overwriteLabel": null,
    "globalTargetTags": [],
    "active": true,
    "parameters": [
      {
        "name": "field",
        "value": {
          "format": "FieldParameterValue",
          "value": "category_id"
        },
        "scope": "global"
      },
      {
        "name": "operator",
        "value": {
          "format": "StringParameterValue",
          "value": "matches exactly"
        },
        "scope": "global"
      },
      {
        "name": "required",
        "value": {
          "format": "BooleanParameterValue",
          "value": false
        },
        "scope": "global"
      },
      {
        "name": "orCondition",
        "value": {
          "format": "BooleanParameterValue",
          "value": false
        },
        "scope": "global"
      },
      {
        "name": "boostFilter",
        "value": {
          "format": "BooleanParameterValue",
          "value": true
        },
        "scope": "global"
      },
      {
        "name": "boostWeight",
        "value": {
          "format": "StringParameterValue",
          "value": "500"
        },
        "scope": "global",
        "startval": {},
        "schema": ""
      },
      {
        "name": "role",
        "value": {
          "format": "StringParameterValue",
          "value": "mainProduct"
        },
        "scope": "global",
        "startval": {},
        "schema": ""
      }
    ],
    "segmentationIds": [],
    "segmentationUniqueKeys": [],
    "CPOInitiativeId": null,
    "notes": null,
    "options": {
      "status": null,
      "includeWidgets": null,
      "excludeWidgets": null,
      "allWidgets": null,
      "conditionalSegments": null,
      "conditionalProductSelections": null,
      "ordering": null,
      "parameters": [
        {
          "name": "system",
          "values": [
            "false"
          ]
        }
      ],
      "allLinkedAccounts": null,
      "accounts": null
    },
    "icons": {
      "strategy": {
        "value": "cpo_sales.png",
        "tooltip": "SALES OPTIMIZATION"
      },
      "level": {
        "value": "L1",
        "tooltip": "LEVEL 1 - ONLINE CONVERSIONS"
      },
      "initiative": {
        "value": "fa-folder",
        "tooltip": "EFFECTIVE CONTEXT"
      },
      "character": {
        "value": "",
        "tooltip": ""
      },
      "mode": {
        "label": "",
        "value": "",
        "tooltip": ""
      }
    },
    "sections": [
      {
        "id": "main",
        "label": "Values",
        "active": true
      },
      {
        "id": "advanced",
        "label": "Advanced",
        "active": false
      }
    ],
    "status": true,
    "isSelected": true
  }
]

UP-SELL: Similar Product Suggestions on PDP