Cross-selling is tricky business. Even the best recommendation engines are making educated guesses.

But the strongest indication of in-the-moment interest is what the customer just added to cart.

And the most no-brainer cross-sell recommendation is more of that thing (rather than more like that thing).

Let’s look at a few ideas for selling more of ‘that thing’ —

and it starts with thinking about how to turn product attributes into a cross-sell experience.

Honeylove’s BOGO experience

Attribute: Color

Immediately after adding to cart, Honeylove serves a modal with your chosen size variant pre-selected, all you have to do is choose the next (or same) color to add a second item with one tap.

After you add to cart, the drawer keeps the add-more option - check it out on mobile and desktop:

The Perfect Jean does similar, with waist and inseam variants pre-selected:

Voluspa’s Product Options widget

Attribute: Scent

Voluspa carries a variety of home scent product types that share signature scent variants, but that’s not obvious to shoppers — especially those that landed directly on a specific PDP.

Because it makes perfect sense to place a consistent scent throughout the home, this is an opportunity to cross-sell “more of this in a different form.”

Voluspa managed to make it display beautifully above the fold on mobile as well:

And the added beauty is after adding an item to cart, closing the drawer to “Continue Shopping” keeps you on the PDP where the cross-sells remain front-and-center (vs recommendations carousels placed way below the fold).

This is one of the upsides of listing each variant as its own product versus with "choose variants" in the Buy Box — it leaves more room for components like this. Of course, this makes scent variant discovery harder - who said product management was easy?

Aritzia’s “More in [color]”

Attribute: Color

Aritzia’s More in [color] PDP carousel is awesome, but it does live at the bottom of the page.

I’d love to see this tested as a modal after adding to cart, similar to Honeylove’s example above, with the last added size pre-selected (or from profile data for top-bottom suggestions, Aritzia already uses True Fit data to suggest sizes for registered users):

Alo’s “More in [fabric]”

Attribute: Fabric

Similarly, Alo’s known for its signature fabrics which have their own unique selling propositions to them. Pre-selecting the added-to-cart size and color variants may help turn this concept into a one-tap add-on like Honeylove’s modal:

Bonus idea: show this particular cross-sell strategy if the customer arrived at the product page through a "Shop by material" banner or collection, or clicked a fabric attribute from Collection filters.

Mystery BOGOs

If you can call 2 DTC merchants doing this a trend… this is one’s trending in drinkware ;)

Both Brumate and Corkcicle use a post add to cart pop up to ask if you’d like a deep discount on another version of what you just added to cart:

Corkcicle doesn’t take no for an answer, if you continue to cart the offer follows you ;)

How does this strategy apply to BFCM?

If you’re still reading, remember…

BFCM buyers shop for themselves

We all know that the best (and sometimes only) deals from our favorite merchants are saved for Black Friday, and some of your customers will ONLY shop this sale.

Sitewide savings are an opportunity to stock up on most wanted items, and occasionally to buy something nice for someone else. Take advantage of this behavior and encourage “more of the same” hoarding.

Mobile visitors need help with their shopping journey

Many new visitors will come straight to your PDPs from Meta ads, and if you’re lucky they’ll add that product to cart, see that they’re “$X away from free shipping!” and decide whether to keep shopping, leave the site or just check out.

Testing ways to guide selling towards “more of this” (versus more like this) may work for you!

Cross-selling in the cart is challenging

You only have 2-3 slots to “get it right” and it’s nearly impossible to ‘personalize’ for new visitors beyond showing products with strong affinity to what’s in their cart. And there’s not much real estate in the cart drawer to merchandise them effectively.

Think of ways to use that last viewed PDP to keep customers shopping, and that means leveraging above-the-fold real estate for “next step” shopping (whatever the strategy).