How to cross-merchandise toy collections so customers buy more

Cross-merchandising, also known as cross-selling, is displaying complementary products next to each other or providing complementary product recommendations.

This encourages customers to purchase more items than they may have originally intended. The benefits are an improved customer experience while also increasing sales. It’s a win-win.

Here are my top four tips for successfully cross-selling more toy products, with accompanying recommendations from Keycraft’s wholesale toy collections. These techniques can be put into practice in-store and online.

1. Choose collectable toy ranges

Toy collections that offer several items or characters to collect will readily generate multiple-item purchases per customer basket, especially at pocket-money price points.

Our popular GOGOPO™ collection is a perfect example, offering colourful and child-friendly novelties, stationery sets, fluffy pom poms, putty, and more.

We have several more top-selling collectable toy ranges in the pocket-money category, including Nurchums Elementos™, LOLLIPUTTI™ and Fumfings.

2. Create themed displays across product categories

Consider your current store (or website homepage) layout, and whether any product connections could be made to create more impactful themed displays from across your product categories.

For example, rather than having all your children’s books exclusively on a book stand, display complimentary toys and books together in a themed display. That could include positioning books about animals and wildlife next to our fabulous Living Nature™ soft toys. Do provide options across a few age groups if possible.

Seasonal displays are also ideal for featuring multiple products under a wider theme, such as Halloween toys or Christmas stocking fillers. Don’t forget about seasonal display signage, which Keycraft can help with too.

3. Highlight complimentary products side-by-side

Do your selected toy products require, or lend themselves, to any complementary products?

Some of the science kits in our Magnoidz™ educational toy range require batteries, although batteries aren’t included in the pack. It’s an easy cross-sell opportunity to offer batteries on a hanging rack beside relevant products, or at the till.

Classic wooden toys like those in our Majigg™ range complement traditional decorative toy boxes. Colouring books require pencils, crayons, pens or paint. Craft kits may require glue or child-friendly scissors for cutting card, etc.

4. Offer product recommendations

Recommendations, particularly from other people, are incredibly effective at boosting shoppers’ basket size. Train your in-store staff to circulate and make product recommendations, and prioritise the development of their product knowledge.

If you have an eCommerce store then invest in product recommendations functionality, whether you highlight products in the same range, or enable automatic recommendations based on what other customers also purchased.

If you have any questions about our product ranges, or want help optimizing your store according to the proven Science of Impulse, get in touch for advice from our friendly team of account managers today!