Not all offline marketing strategies work in the online environment.

Let's look at the example of a person that has just run out of milk for their coffee and has to venture to the supermarket to purchase this one item. We all know that if you go to a supermarket and all you want to buy is milk, you must trek all the way to the back of the supermarket, as far back into the building as is possible, to retrieve your bottle of milk. Then trek all the way back to the check-out and wait in a long and slow queue to buy your one item. It is a very frustrating experience - so why do we do it?

We do it because that supermarket is the closest one to where we live and we need the milk urgently. We know that if we drive further down the road to another supermarket, the milk will also be stored at the far back of the building, so we put up with the inconvenience.

Why do supermarkets do this when they know if frustrates the shopper? Because they can!

Storing an essential item such as milk at the back of the store is a marketing strategy designed to encourage us to purchase other items in our travels to the back of the store, or while waiting in a long queue.

Does this strategy work in the online environment?

NO! This is the complete opposite of what you should do with products on a website.

The online user is impatient, focused on the task at hand and wants to make the online purchase as quickly, efficiently and easily as possible. If a product is hard to find on a site (at the back of the store), then it is easy for a user to leave the site and go to a competitor site to purchase the product. A click of the mouse is so much easier than driving further down the road to another supermarket.

With Internet marketing, the objective is to make the entire purchase a satisfying experience for the user, not a frustrating one like the buyer at the supermarket.

Up-sell and cross-sell opportunities can be displayed on the search results page if the user uses search on a site to find an item, on a product page, or throughout the transaction process. I will often look at the products listed to the side of the page that displays related items or the specials. I will not consider reading pop-ups or anything else that I feel is forceful.

Don't force the user to trek to the back of the store on your website.