Cross-Selling & Up-Selling
Cross-selling recommends complementary products alongside an item in the basket, matching accessories for example, while up-selling suggests a higher-value alternative that meets the same need. Both techniques aim to raise the average order value and are usually placed on product and basket pages and in confirmation emails; whether they actually do so depends on the placement and relevance of the recommendations and can only be measured in your own shop.
In practice
From an SEO point of view, well-maintained cross-selling blocks such as “goes well with” or “customers also bought” add internal links between thematically related product pages, which supports crawling and topical relevance. What matters is that the recommendations stay coherent – random linking harms the user experience and, indirectly, ranking signals such as time on site. Many shop systems control cross- and up-selling through rule-based or AI-supported recommendation engines that draw on purchase history and product attributes from the data feed.