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Intelligent Cross-Sell™ FAQs

What is Intelligent Cross-Sell?

A service that allows retailers to target, automate, and optimize how they cross-sell and upsell—for example, suggesting the best carrying case and travel mouse to sell alongside a notebook computer, or suggesting a better notebook computer than the one under consideration.

What's the benefit?

Higher average order size and less manual-labor cost.

How does it work?

Intelligent Cross-Sell (ICS) works like a good salesperson thinks: Is this accessory compatible? Is it produced by a featured manufacturer? Is it popular? Is it profitable? ICS allows you to target by these and many other factors.

What product categories does ICS cover?

Whichever ones you have. If you sell consumer-electronics and/or computer products, you have the option of using CNET Content Solutions's product data to enhance your targeting of cross-sells and upsells in these categories, but it is not required.

When and where is Intelligent Cross-Sell available?

It is available to customers in the United States and Canada. We will be announcing roll-outs to other regions in the future.

Where does it work?

E-commerce sites and call centers.

Who created Intelligent Cross-Sell?

CNET Content Solutions, a property of CBS Interactive. We maintain and sell DataSource™, the world's largest commercial database of tech products. Our customers include CDW, Dell, HP, Insight, Microsoft, Sony, Yahoo!, and hundreds more.

How much does it cost?

Intelligent Cross-Sell's cost depends on several the factors, the primary one being the scale at which it is used—big customers pay more than small ones. Small customers start at US $3,500 per month, and big customers tend to be in the $10,000 to $20,000 per month range, depending on a few different factors of bigness.

That's a lot of money!

Intelligent Cross-Sell is for businesses that have at least $10 million in e-commerce and/or call-center revenue. For these types of businesses, the potential cost savings and revenue increases from Intelligent Cross-Sell exceed the price significantly. As the customer's revenue base gets bigger, so does the return on investment.

Do you offer pay-for-performance pricing?

Yes. The core technology license is a fixed monthly fee, but professional-services projects are available with pay-for-performance pricing. These projects are for customers that already have achieved the first level of gains from Intelligent Cross-Sell and wish to employ advanced forms of testing, analysis, and optimization.

Is there any software to install or maintain?

All of Intelligent Cross-Sell's software is hosted. Business users do targeting and reporting via a Web browser. Product recommendations a re delivered either in batch or in real time for inclusion in your Web site or call-center application.

What does Intelligent Cross-Sell deliver to Web sites?

For each primary product you sell, ICS delivers one or more lists of product recommendations—for example, a list of cross-sells and a list of upsells. The list can also include optional content such as natural-language pitches. You can further segment recommendations by site area, so that (for example) you can have different cross-sells for the same product in the shopping cart versus the product page. The exact format of the content delivered depends on how you choose to integrate with Intelligent Cross-Sell.

Will ICS slow down my Web pages?

ICS offers multiple delivery options, each of which can be implemented so that loading ICS content does not block the rest of your page's loading.

What are the delivery options?

• Server-Side Web Service. When a user requests a page with cross-sells, your server spawns a request to the ICS server. The ICS server returns the cross-sell information as XML. Your server processes the information and integrates it into the page delivered back to the user, either directly or as part of a JavaScript- or IFRAME-delivered content chunk. This option allows you to post-process the information delivered by ICS, such as to join with real-time pricing and availability data.
• Client-Side Web Service. You put a tag in your product page's HTML. When a user requests the page, the tag calls the Intelligent Cross-Sell server, which delivers the cross-sell content directly to the user's browser. The content can be written into the page by JavaScript or via an IFRAME, neither of which will interfere with the rest of your page's loading. This type of mechanism is commonly used in advertising networks.
• Data Feed. Intelligent Cross-Sell provides delimited data files that you can import into your content-management system as a batch process. From there, you can format, modify, and serve the cross-sells entirely within your native infrastructure.

What is the set-up process?

Set-up involves two main tasks on your end:

• Create a data feed that indicates, at minimum, the product IDs of the products you stock, the product names, their categories, their product-page URLs, and image URLs. You may also include additional attributes about each product, such as its current inventory status or profitability. These attributes would then be usable for cross-sell targeting in addition to the attributes ICS automatically includes. We accept feeds as delimited files via the secure file-transfer mechanism SCP. In all likelihood, your company is already preparing and sending similar feeds to ther entities like comparison-shopping services.
• Integrate with the Intelligent Cross-Sell delivery system. The effort required depends on the delivery option you choose. For example, the Client-Side Web Service method (see above) only requires a single tag be inserted into your product-page template. However, all methods of integration are designed as light integrations, requiring between hours and days of a technical person's time.