188 ‘Cross-Sells’ Design Examples

While cross-sells and product recommendations during the cart & checkout will often seem to be in the e-commerce site’s interest, there’s a delicate balance to be struck when it comes to deliberately asking users to focus on something else than completing their purchase. Especially injected cross-sells that require users to make an active decision (e.g., to accept or reject an offer) to be able to proceed to the next checkout step are, by users, often perceived as highly aggressive. For example, in our large-scale checkout testing 66% of users who had initiated a checkout and had to go through a separate step displaying a cross-sell at Amazon exhibited extreme frustration. Besides the examples below, also see our article “6 Ways to Improve the Relevance of Cross-Sells in the Cart - 52% of Desktop Sites Don’t Do Enough“.