We spotted this great implementation of a product recommendation strategy from Naked Wines.
Clever UX/conversion element from @NakedWines. Here’s what you see if you ‘view basket’ when it’s empty. twitter.com/danbarker/stat…
— dan barker (@danbarker) May 25, 2012
I’m not sure if many people without a product already in their basket will click the basket button, but for those that do there’s a great opportunity to recommend a product to encourage a purchase.
I’m also not sure how the suggestion is calculated: it could just be a static product that the team want to sell, or one specially picked for beginners – the name of this product, a “Wine Advisor’s Top 10″, adds the idea of expert curation and social proof. A dynamic suggestion based on the visitor’s behaviour would most likely provide the best return by understanding the preferences they display whilst browsing, especially for logged in users.
They also encourage visitors to also purchase an Angel membership by highlighting the price for Angel members. By having a dropdown basket only, instead of a seperate basket page, they may be reducing their ability to increase average order value through related cross-sell: our research finds that cross-sells work best on the checkout page – although this may be part of their strategy to reduce barriers to purchase.
So, a great example of product recommendations, and one to test on your site!