Upsell or cross-sell? Most carts get this wrong

Advertise to 40,444 E-Commerce Businesses

Promote your tool, service or upcoming event - Reach Founders

Good morning!

In today’s newsletter,

This issue takes 2 minutes to read.

Check out our DTC tool stack here

Let’s dive into it👇

A guy just built the first one-person billion-dollar company.

It's called Medvi. They sell GLP-1s online.

$20k to start. $401M in year one. Pacing $1.8B in year two

No employees.

Think about that for a second.

Boll & Branch does $200M a year. Their CEO built an AI agent, connected it to Shopify and Slack, and now pulls customer reports on demand. No analyst. No agency.

None of this is possible if you're using AI as a chatbot, typing questions and reading answers. That's not what these businesses are doing.

They're running agents. Systems that work in the background, connected to real business data, taking real actions.

We run this newsletter — 40,000 subscribers — with less than 3 people. AI agents handle most parts of the business right now.

If you've been reading for a while, you know how bullish we are on this.

It's why we launched AI Launch Codes.

To teach founders how to use AI to scale their business, reduce costs and save time.

Step 1 — We identify the bottlenecks and opportunities in your business

Step 2 — We build custom agentic workflows connected to your Shopify, Klaviyo, and whatever else runs your store

Step 3 — We train you to run it. These aren't static automations. They learn and improve the longer they run.

First 5 people get bonuses worth $750:

Your discount codes are working. Just not how you think. A lot of the shoppers who were given a discount would have purchased at full price. That's margin you're giving away for nothing.

RevLifter fixes this. We show offers only to visitors people hesitating at checkout, comparing prices, or about to leave. High-intent shoppers never see a discount. You protect margin where it matters and convert more visitors where it doesn't.

The result? Brands typically see 20% more conversions, 30% higher AOV, 5% more revenue, and 10% saved on promotion costs. We run it as a managed service (you don't lift a finger) and prove results through proper incrementality testing.

Upselling means getting the customer to buy a better version of what's already in the cart.

Bigger size. Bundle. Subscription instead of one-time.

The customer already wants the product, you're just showing them a more valuable way to get it.

Cross-selling means adding something complementary.

They bought the phone cover, now show them the screen protector or the phone holder.

The mistake most brands make: showing cross-sells when they should upsell, or vice versa.

Here's a simple way to decide.

If what's in the cart has a natural upgrade (larger quantity, better format, subscription option) lead with the upsell. The customer is already sold on the product. Meeting a bigger need isn't a stretch.

If there's no meaningful upgrade, look at what else they'll need.

A cross-sell that genuinely completes the purchase feels helpful. One that doesn't connect feels random.

Testing has shown that cross-sell recommendations shown in the cart, right before checkout, are four times more effective than showing them earlier in the funnel.

One more rule: keep it to one or two recommendations max. More than that and you're creating noise.

Revenue per session is the best single metric to track, because a change that improves AOV(average order value) but hurts checkout completion can easily cost you more than it made you.

Action Summary:

In a recent issue of Common Ground, the Ground team broke down the rise of OpenClaw - the open-source AI agent built over a weekend that hit 215,000 GitHub stars and caught the attention of OpenAI.

They explored what it actually is and why the hype is warranted.

They covered what OpenClaw means for your team, why the "AI is taking jobs" framing misses the point entirely, and what agentic AI actually looks like in practice for ecommerce brands.

Read more on why the shift from AI that assists to AI that operates changes everything.

100 CFOs and VPs of Finance were surveyed.

63% said they'd consider buying from a vendor they'd never heard of.

Then we asked what actually happened.

65% of the time, they went with a brand they already knew.

They're not lying.

Here's one in their own words: "We absolutely consider unknown tools. But established vendors carry lower operational risk and are much easier to get through our internal approval process."

Unknown vendors usually lose at every stage of the internal buying process — more justification required, extra security vetting, no peer references to shortcut approval, real career risk if the new vendor fails.

So if you're selling into finance without name recognition, make it easy for a finance leader to build the internal case.

Action Summary:

Credit: Peep Laja

59% of Americans say most marketing emails offer no real value. That's not a threat, it's an opening. Get the AI-powered playbook for building email campaigns that actually convert.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your free AI-powered email marketing playbook today.

Get The Playbook