How much does your upsell app really earn you?
Every upsell app puts a big number at the top of its dashboard: revenue generated. It is the number that justifies the subscription and, on revenue-share plans, the number the app bills you on. It is worth knowing what it actually measures, because it is rarely the money the app made you.
Attributed revenue is not extra revenue
That number counts every accepted offer. But some of those customers would have bought the product anyway: they came for the charger too, and the offer only saved them a search. The app gets credit for a sale it didn’t create. Extra revenue is what remains once you remove the sales that would have happened without the offer. It is always smaller, and no dashboard can compute it exactly on its own.
The cart-page trap: added isn’t paid
An offer on the cart page ends with a product in the cart, not with a payment. The customer can still leave at checkout. An app that adds up those cart additions and calls them revenue counts abandoned carts as sales. Ask your app which of the two it shows you.
The discount leak
If your offer carries a discount, count what it costs on the orders that would have included the product anyway. A 20% discount on a product that a third of your customers were already buying is a price cut for that third, not an upsell.
Three checks that take ten minutes
- Compare total sales of the offered product before and after the offer went live, across all orders, not only accepted offers. If the total barely moved, the offer is mostly relabelling sales you already had.
- Look at your average order value over the same periods. If you are seasonal, compare with the same weeks last year.
- Check how often the offered product was bought with the trigger product before the offer existed. If often, expect a large share of acceptances to be sales you would have made anyway.
The clean answer: a holdout group
The only exact method is to hide the offer from a random share of customers, say one in ten, and compare their orders with everyone else’s. It needs volume before it says anything, and few apps offer it. Without one, the three checks above are a reasonable substitute.
What it means for what you pay
On a revenue-share plan, you pay on attributed revenue, including sales you would have made without the app. The more your offers overlap with what customers already buy, the more you pay for nothing. A flat fee doesn’t make attribution any more accurate, but it stops it from inflating your bill.
What FlatUpsell shows
FlatUpsell keeps the two placements apart on purpose. After payment, it reports revenue, because the customer has actually been charged. On the cart page, it reports products added to the cart and says so, because the app can’t know whether that checkout was completed. It is a less flattering number, and a more useful one.