I feel like I can speak with strong authority here as I’ve done multiple businesses with many of these post purchase one click upsell apps for Shopify. Do I think there is a clear winner here? Not exactly but it’s more so dependent on what you’re looking for and what you consider acceptable for price and fees.
Let’s start with the first one I ever touched and am still using today. The first one is Zipify One Click Upsell (OCU) that was built by Ezra Firestone’s company. I first heard of it in early 2017 but to my knowledge it was made in 2016. My first experience with it was a bit buggy but that’s because I was using a 3rd party integration in OCU called trackify which is related to the Facebook pixel for adding additional pixels and customization. Ignoring that Zipify’s One Click Upsell has been an outstanding software that has been relatively bug free for my businesses.
To start, all you have to do is purchase their app and install it on your shopify store. It is indeed a 3rd party app independent from the shopify app store so you will not find it there. Once inside you can start creating your first post purchase funnel. The easiest and most logical thing to start with is selling more of the same product at a discounted price. I usually do this for my first upsell and downsell (if they decline the first offer it takes them to the downsell offer).
Since I have started in 2017 the interface and customization of the funnel has indeed changed and in my opinion for the better. Easily swap in your text and imagery and be on your way you extra revenue with OCU. In addition to your first upsell and downsell you can add an additional two upsells and one more downsell (if the customer declined the second upsell). This is turns out to be less than the next app I have used but in my opinion you should probably not do more than this anyways because it may irritate the customer.
Think of it this way. Extra revenue is good. Creating a bad customer experience is not good. Find the happy ground where the customer walks away feeling they got a really good deal on either more product or another related product that enhances their purchase.
Back to OCU, you can easily setup whether you want to charge shipping or not. You can also assign funnels to specific product/s they purchased making it truly customized for the entire customer experience. You wouldn’t want to upsell a completely unrelated product to their purchase would you?
Speaking of the experience. You can also customize the checkout and thank you page! This is not something you can do in Shopify unless you have Shopify Plus. Although your options are limited in terms of customization here, this certainly helps to add legit trust boosting logos and any additional text you may need.
In terms of reliability. I haven’t had any issues that I know of with OCU outside of the previously mentioned integration with trackify. But that didn’t break OCU, that just had issues with pixel events reporting back to Facebook. I’ve heard in the Adleaks group that I’m part of that some people do have reliability issues though. I don’t believe any software is perfect and people will have different experiences.
In terms of 3rd party integrations I think Zipify’s OCU does a pretty good job working with other companies. At first it was a bit complicated to add a email CRM when I first started using it. However, as time has gone those integrations have become incredibly simple especially if you’re a Klaviyo user like I am.
You may be wondering why you can’t use the typical shopify email crm integrations. Just about any app that works with the default shopify checkout will not work correctly with OCU. This is remedied by the integrations available in OCU to use. Please note this also applies to any of these post purchase upsell apps. For instance if you use an abandoned cart app, you won’t be able to use it. You’ll want to use your email crm that can be used with OCU to send the abandoned carts instead. Don’t worry though! Highly likely that they have your preferred email CRM there.
As for pricing? Well OCU has gone up in price a bit too since I first started. I’d argue though not that significantly and is still more than worth the price. It starts at $56/mo for OCU + 2.5% of upsell revenue essential or $81/mo +2.5% of upsell revenue for OCU Pro. Not too much of a difference in terms of the plans. More split testing capability and more options for payment gateways. It’s important to know that 2.5% upsell revenue ONLY APPLIES TO THE POST PURCHASE REVENUE YOU MAKE THROUGH OCU. The 2.5% does not affect your initial sale before the customer reaches the post purchase funnel.
One thing I must mention to is how purchases are reported back to ad platforms. If you’re using Facebook, it’s going to report back the initial purchase + if you setup custom events you can record the revenue you make on each of those upsell/downsell steps that a customer takes. This does not mean it gets recorded as multiple purchases. But don’t worry they provide a guide on how to set this up. If you’re using google ads, you’ll need to decide where to fire off the google conversion code. In most cases I do it on the loading of the upsell page and disregard revenue made in the post purchase funnel. They also provide a guide on how to set this up with concrete examples for other ad platforms as well.
Overall in terms of price, reliability, and ease of use. Zipify One Click Upsell takes the cake for me. But you should look into considering the other options as well.
The next one I also discovered in 2017. It’s called CartHook by Jordan Gal. This one actually can be worth it on the checkout page alone. Unlike Zipify OCU that pulls many of the default api and elements of the shopify checkout. This checkout becomes a single page checkout, rather than having multiple steps.
The theory behind this is that it results in less loading time which leads to less abandonment. While this theory often holds true, it’s not always the case for every business. It’s something you will want to test out for yourself. For me it was a sometimes case and in those cases it was marginally better.
As for ease of use and customization? I’d actually put CartHook ahead of the pack. You can pretty much start blank as if you were using Clickfunnels. Not to mention they just added order bumps recently which is something that Clickfunnel users love. For producvt assignment, just like Zipify’s OCU you assign funnels via tags to products in order for customer’s to see appropriate funnel.
For carthook you can do an insane 3 upsells and 3 downsells. That may sound like only one more than Zipify but it’s not. Those 3 downsells can actually be used downsell a rejected downsell. Should they accept a downsell it puts them right back into the upsell sequence. I’m sure you can see how this could potentially upset a customer trying to reach the thank you page. So don’t overdo it here.
Carthook comes with a large variety of 3rd party integrations too. Just like the previous, you’ll likely find what you need here. Over time they’ve also been adding more and more including the likes of AfterPay. That’s huge!
Importantly before going in it’s good to be aware of the way CartHook reports conversions back to FB. For each upsell and downsell purchased it will record each one as an additional purchase. That means if someone bought the initial product, 2 upsells, and let’s say one downsell that it would report back as 4 separate purchases including their values reported. The theory behind this is that it will help FB reach the purchase optimization goals it needs to make it smarter. I’m fairly neutral on this. I can see it being a good thing regarding the above theory. Or I can see it being a bad thing because you’re getting purchases being reported at a lower value (at least most likely if you are discounting in your funnel).
Like many software companies, this CartHook decided to raise their price for good. What used to be an entry level of $300 USD with a free 14 day trial is now a minimum of $500 + 0.5% of ALL revenue processed with a call to see if it’s a fit.
They’ve clearly identified the customers they would like to work with and I can definitely understand that business move. As a matter of fact on their price change announcement post they flat out said that they knew smaller businesses would look elsewhere and pointed them to Zipify OCU as a great option and team to work with.
However, CartHook firmly believes if you are processing more than 100k in revenue/mo than they are your best option. If that’s you, you may want to seriously consider joining the CartHook family. I promote a few companies that use CartHook as an affiliate and tend to enjoy the additional revenue made from their upsells in place.
That being said my experience with CartHook as a business user was before they raised the price from $300 to $500 + 0.5% I enjoyed it for one business in particular of mine before Facebook said no no to my creatives. No matter what other creatives I tried, just could not get it to work again. Sad.
Onto the final one which at least at this moment is not accepting new stores. It’s called InterCart and was created by the Tan Brothers who are well established name in the e-commerce and in particular dropshipping industry. Perhaps it is connected to PP Funnels which their help center is linked to from the intercart home page. Regardless, much like the previously mentioned apps, this one supports the ability to do custom upsell and downsell pages.
Also like the others, Intercart makes it easy to work with just about any payment gateway you need. Not just stripe and paypal. But notably, they’ve found a way for users to hit the checkout with paypal button from the cart and still have the customer go through the post purchase upsell. Previously this was “not something that could be done” in which hitting that button would bypass the post purchase checkout and use the regular shopify checkout instead.
Interestingly they also have a feature to change the funnel’s checkout language. Not the text that you can edit in shopify, I mean like actual native language. This could prove incredibly useful depending on where you are getting your traffic from. Therefore you can make funnels based on region.
Not surprisingly that benefits dropshippers the most who are dropshipping worldwide. Afterall, it was a software made by dropshippers for the purpose of using it themselves. With that in mind I’d also be a bit cautious to use Intercart if you’re dropshipping products. Wouldn’t be hard for the owners to see the data and use it as intel for their own product launches in a flash. But that is assuming the worst case and I’m willing to bet they got better things to do. But who knows?
So should you add one of these three apps to your shopify store? Probably. Plus if you didn’t know, it bypasses the shopify checkout fees if you were using anything other than shopify pay. This is of course being said on the basis that you already have a proven and working offer. Chances are extremely high that you’ll add additional revenue easily for your store. I still prefer Zipify OCU the most of out these because it’s easy to use, works with my software/app stack and comes at a reasonable price.
