Cross selling is the sales strategy popularized by Amazon where products or services are displayed next to the product that your customer is interested in purchasing.  

It's a great way to increase customer loyalty and deepen loyal relationships. This makes cross-selling an ideal strategy to foster the growth of a digital business.

Implementing the suggestive offer helps increase sales, since there are characteristics in different products that are related to the ones your customers went to buy. This is how they choose to buy more, taking advantage of promotions and quantity discounts, which is why they end up buying several related or complementary products.

For example, if a consumer enters the purchasing process for a television, the chosen product and others appear on the screen, such as wall mounts or tables with the correct measurements for that television that they added to the cart. 

Although Amazon is a vanguard in this model, currently numerous ecommerce platforms offer sales and cross selling: Mercado Libre, Tienda Nube, Diggit and many more. 

Amazon attributes the technique of cross-selling to 35% of its sales, currently.

This action can be interpreted as a commercial strategy to get customers excited about other products and spend more. By simply entering the Amazon site and clicking on any product,  the other tempting options unfold.

The intelligence of Bezos, the founder of Amazon, to implement cross selling in a business that offers such varied products, has allowed him to obtain million-dollar profits above his competitors, taking advantage of customers' purchasing emotion at the time of acquisition. 

How Amazon becomes the largest e-commerce platform in the world

It has established itself as one of the most profitable and popular e-commerce companies for entertainment and various products in the world, along with Netflix, who until now had almost no rivals within the streaming platform, after Blockbuster closed its doors permanently. (Read the article about Netflix)

Amazon's rise as a cloud platform is not only due to its entertainment service, but also to a multiple variety of services and products for sale, such as software, video games, music, books, clothing, furniture, etc.

Currently, it is gaining millions of followers with the creation of content and making great audiovisual productions for series lovers, which it broadcasts via streaming, just like Netflix. 

The story of Amazon

Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. Previously, he had resigned as vice president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street company, and moved to Seattle, where he began working on a business plan, which would eventually become Amazon.com.

Bezos had chosen the name Amazon for his e-commerce business from the meaning of the term “Amazon”, linked to the exotic Brazilian region and the river that bears its name, which is the largest in the world, as he planned to make his company Amazon the largest in the world as well.

He made a list of the 20 products that could be marketed online, of which only 5 remained: CDs, computers, software, videos and books. Among this smaller list, the founder decided to market books online, due to the great global demand for literature.

The low prices for books and the large number of interesting titles provided Amazon with enormous success, so that it had literally become the largest online platform for selling digital books.

The business plan was quite risky, since he expected to obtain profits from his large initial investment within a stipulated period of 5 years, which could turn out very well or very badly. 

However, luck was on their side because while many companies ended up melting down due to the expansion of the Internet in the early 2000s, Amazon remained and really began to grow, obtaining enormous profits that demonstrated the success of its ambitious plan.

Amazon launched a new marketing strategy it called Amazon Prime Day.

The company offered its Prime customers the opportunity to get flash offers on millions of products during 'Prime Day'. However, in 2019, taking into account the success of the previous Prime Day launch, Amazon decided to increase the offers from 24 to 48 hours.

The Amazon case is another evidence that growth does not necessarily have to be short-term, but by focusing on the appropriate strategy, progress is possible. 

Just as Apple, Google, Coca Cola, Lay's, Netflix itself achieved an important positioning in the market by creating products or services designed to satisfy the demand of a large audience, Amazon is added to this list as one of the most profitable companies in recent years, and probably the second most profitable within electronic commerce. 

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