What is Obselling in sales?

In the field of commerce, both physical (in a store) and digital (on the Internet), there are two well-known sales techniques to push your customer to increase their purchase basket: Upselling and Cross-selling. But do you know Obselling?

Before we introduce you to this sales technique that will allow you to save time by getting the most out of your obsolete products and converting this time into money, let’s go back to the traditional marketing strategies.

Upselling is the process of offering your customer a higher-end product, without raising the price too much.
Cross-selling is an additional sale: you suggest related products, which will allow the customer to get more out of their purchase.

These techniques are quite effective, and sometimes complementary.

Now, let’s say you have products that are at the end of their life. You know, the ones that nobody wants to buy anymore, or that are not even offered for sale anymore…

The question is: what do you do with your sales pages or product sheets, the work they required to be well referenced, and their SEO performance? In the trash? NO!

It would be a shame to lose all this visibility benefit, which cost you time and money to get a well referenced product on your e-commerce site…

This is where Obselling comes into play…

Obselling, a word that is not likely to become obsolete in the marketing world!

We noticed that when a product disappeared from an e-commerce site, there were only three solutions to propose from an online store, and that they were not necessarily the best ones, namely :

• the deletion of the product and its page, which leads to a loss of SEO of the latter;
• the automatic redirection of the product to another product, which leads to a misunderstanding of the user, who finds himself on the page of a product not sought;
• redirecting the product to the site’s home page, which also leads to misunderstanding on the part of the user.

You know what they say: if answers A, B and C don’t suit you, it’s because answer D is missing… In this case, it was a matter of developing a marketing strategy and an appropriate word to define it.

Obselling is defining that a product is no longer available due to obsolescence and that it’s time to replace it with another one, without losing the benefits of visibility and SEO.

Currently, products that are out of date simply become “obsolete”! But they still have visibility in SERPs (search engines) like Google and it is interesting to be able to keep and exploit this visibility.

By implementing an Obselling strategy, you continue to bring users to the page of the obsolete product, but you offer them a replacement product. Thus, this page gives you the opportunity to sell a newer product.

Your customer buys a product that meets their expectations, and you don’t lose any sales.

It’s a win/win!

Did you say “Obselling”?

Let’s go over the composition of this word.

The sales terms “Upselling” and “Cross-selling” are both composed of the word “selling”.

• “Up” means “up”, in this case upmarket.
• “Cross” means “to cross”, to offer additional products.

For “Obselling”, we find “selling” for “sale”, and “obs” for “obsolete”. This word qualifies the art of proposing to the sale of more recent products to replace obsolete, outdated or out of fashion products.
The merger made sense: Obselling

Obsolete + Selling = Obselling

Obselling was born! This new marketing term perfectly defines the sales of replacement products for a product that was no longer available in your store.

The icing on the cake is that this word is international and fits perfectly into the logic and understanding of marketing professionals.

How to use Obselling in your online store?

First of all, it is important to understand that this technique works on products that you no longer sell (without removing them of course) in your store.

You can’t use Obselling on products that are still on sale and in use: it would make no sense to restrict the purchase of such a product!

Here is the method to follow to propose new products instead of obsolete ones.

1. List the obsolete products in your store.
2. List the replacement products.
3. Install the free version of the extension from your site (download from WordPress) or buy the PRO version to get all the features.
4. Define the affected products as obsolete.
5. And finish by adding the replacement products!