Cross-selling to Baby Boomers

This is a good article about how a company (Footsmart) changed the way its web site cross-sold to its older audience - with startling results.

Unfortunately, the conclusions drawn are not necessarily correct.

Footsmart's problems/issues were :

It was spending at least 20 hours a week manually adjusting their cross-sells system for the shopping cart. It was time-consuming. Solution: Automate their cross-sells while extending them into their product-details pages.

The reason they extended to the product page was a hunch that the cross-sells would help their Baby Boomer demographic find what they were looking for without having to navigate multiple pages. “They were not as savvy as more Web-experienced shoppers”.

Eyetracking research shows that ads served below the fold stand far less chance of being seen, but because of Footsmart's page design problems it was forced to put the cross-sell information below the fold on the product detail pages – would it work?

Read the article and you will see that everything worked well and conclusions were drawn. Here are some alternative thoughts.

Footsmart weren’t that smart in manually adjusting the cross sells in the shopping cart. The automated system was much better.

Had Footsmart used their old system of cross-sell selection on product pages they would have genertated just as good results?

Using cross-selling on the product page works for all ages - not just Boomers. It is a function of Web design not generational preference.

I could go on and on. Still it is well worth the read. Dick Stroud