8 Best eCommerce Post-Purchase Upsell Optimisations & Strategies (2025)

💬 If there's one area where more brands need to focus more on, and that's implementing strategies to help increase AOV (overall), which in turn can lead to improving LTV.

These are the primary reasons why an awesome post-purchase upsell strategy can really help catapult growth:

• The more you get from AOV (for first-time customers in particular), the more profitability/higher revenue
• A really key imp. point - brands can have the ability to recoup CAC faster (critical if you focus heavily on paid acquisition for first-time purchasers)
• Naturally, repeat customers will come back again, and having a post purchase CX in place can help with LTV
• It's cost-effective/fast to implement (and there are some awesome software vendor options available)
• Great way to provide a good UX to customers (with personalised recommendations)

These are some of the core benefits/factors that I often remind clients/brands.

My recommended strategies, tactics, and 'offer' thoughts for a frictionless post-purchase to improve AOV

I've put some post-purchase upsell recommendations together that I talk to brands/clients about (and have also seen been implemented by well-known brands), which are fairly fast/easy to implement.

There are a few key factors for making upsells work through a post-purchase experience, incl. the likes that you ensure that the offer makes sense based on the cart value, having a sense of urgency, great social proof with reviews/stars, and more importantly, messaging based on cohorts/segments.

Make sure to highlight offers that are complementary/relevant to the purchase, and that are cost-effective enough to get them to convert. Remember, you want to make it enticing enough and not "out of reach" in terms of price.

There are numerous offers that you can highlight, but my favourites for post-purchase are complementary products, that are packaged in bundles or even as BOGO one-time offers.

I'm going to mention some apps below that I recommend, but having 1-click offers is an awesome UX to quickly add more to their order in real-time.

One of my favourite tactics that has proven to be really effective for conversion with upsells in checkout are countdown timers. So easy to have these highlighted automatically with a 3rd party app (which I mention some options below).

On top of the checkout experience, include countdown timer offers within "thank you" emails, with the likes of a special coupon with reduced RRP that is unique to the customer.

Setting this type of autoresponder email works really well - and ensure the content is dynamic based on whatever the customer has purchased (or even the amount they bought).

In order to make a lot of the above work, you've got to install a 3rd-party app - otherwise the opportunity cost of going custom vs buying a subscription to save time is going to take you a long time. I recommend looking into the likes of Reconvert, Aftersell, or Zipify.

I recommend looking into offering "downsells" - which simply means you provide an offer when someone doesn't initially select your primary special offer. You see this tactic a lot in classic sales funnels, but I've found to be a really good test for some specific segments for eComm brands.

Again, much easier to have this working with a special app that specialises in creating these dynamic experiences.

Based on some of the tools I've recommended (and most will at least do this very soon), is that there are "AI-based" optimisations that will automatically do some of the heavy-lifting for you, without having to go into deep segmentation. So I do suggest you check out some of options and look out for whether or not they have this capability.

And of course, always recommend to never stop testing - do some A/B split-tests based on offers, and overlay based on the various behaviours of customer segments.