What is a downsell?
A downsell is a cheaper offer made to a shopper who just said no to a pricier one: one pair of socks after they pass on the 3-pack. The aim is to save the sale, so the shopper leaves with something smaller instead of nothing.
How does a downsell work?
Say a shopper pays for a $30 tee and your post-purchase page offers a $45 hoodie. They tap no, and a $12 beanie appears. If 400 shoppers a month refuse the hoodie and one in twenty takes the beanie, that is 20 beanies and $240 from people who already said no.
The smaller offer can be a cheaper model, one item instead of a multipack, or the same item paid in installments. A payment plan keeps the price and shrinks what the shopper pays today.
Downsell vs upsell: what's the difference?
An upsell asks for more, the bigger size or better model, and a cross-sell adds a different item beside it. A downsell comes after a no and asks for less. It differs from a discount too: a discount cuts the refused item's price, while a downsell swaps in a smaller one, so the hoodie never goes on sale.
Subscription software uses the word for revenue lost when a customer stays but pays less.
How do you downsell on Shopify?
Shopify has no downsell of its own. The classic spot is the post-purchase page, after payment and before the order confirmation, and it takes an app. You can run one post-purchase app at a time, on the Basic plan or above. Shopify shows no post-purchase offer on orders paid with Shop Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Some of the post-purchase upsell apps compared here follow a no with a cheaper second offer. Keep that step down rare. Shoppers who learn that a no brings a cheaper offer can start saying no on purpose.
Before payment, no offer has been refused yet, so the nearest thing to a downsell is a cheaper choice left in view, like the single pair beside the 3-pack. Where your store qualifies, a Shop Pay Installments line under the price offers the payment-plan version, an $80 jacket as four payments of $20. How to upsell on Shopify covers the offer a downsell follows.
Upsells and cross-sells with Sledge
Sledge runs upsell and cross-sell placements in the cart drawer and on product pages, and an offer on the thank-you page. On a paid plan, Growth Intelligence finds offer opportunities in your order patterns, totals what its fixes could add in one dollar figure, labeled "Est. potential", then measures the result against real sales.
