Cross Selling (SAP Library - Basic Functions and Master Data in SD Processing (SD-BF))

Cross Selling

Use

Mail order catalog retailers frequently use cross selling to increase sales. When a customer orders an article over the phone, the order taker can suggest additional articles that the customer might buy. For example, if the customer orders a VCR, you might suggest purchasing some blank tapes; for a cellular phone, a leather carrying case.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text

The sales transaction takes place as normal: The customer chooses an article and the order taker enters it on the sales order screen. The order taker can press Enter after each article, or wait until the customer has finished selecting the article he or she wants.

If the order taker presses Enter after entering the data for one article, then a dialog box appears automatically, displaying a list of articles to be suggested to the customer. These cross selling articles are ones that pertain specifically to the purchased article.

If the order taker waits to press Enter until the customer has finished ordering, then the dialog box appears automatically, this time showing all of the articles in the sales order, along with their corresponding cross selling articles.

Note

The articles that appear in the cross selling dialog box always depend on which articles are in the sales order. If you want to have the system suggest articles based on the customer's past purchasing history or other factors, see Dynamic Product Proposal in the standard SD documentation.

The cross selling dialog box displays the following information:

Article number

Description

Sales unit of measure (each, 3-pack, etc.)

Price per unit of measure (calculated either by the standard R/3 pricing scheme or by a custom pricing scheme you have defined)

Availability check

Delivery flag (that is, whether the cross selling articles can be delivered independently of their corresponding main articles in the sales order, or whether the cross selling articles can only be shipped either together with or after the main articles have been shipped)

Note

You can turn off the availability check in Customizing, thereby increasing system performance.

Integration

You can set up the system so that if a customer orders a specific article, a list of other suggested articles appears as well. If the customer chooses to accept one of the suggested articles, the article is flagged in the sales transaction data indicating that this article was a result of cross selling. You can then analyze the results in the Business Workbench or Retail Information System to see how successful your cross selling strategy is (that is, how frequently a suggested article is actually purchased by the customer).

For each article, you can assign one or more cross selling articles.

Prerequisites

To set up cross selling, you must make the following settings in Customizing:

Create the conditions tables, access sequence, and calculation schemes for determining cross selling articles, since the cross selling function relies on the conditions technique. (Alternatively, you can use the analysis discussed in "Activities" below to create the data automatically.)

Create a cross selling profile with the following attributes:

Determination of cross selling articles via function module

Price calculation scheme

Scheme using conditions technique

Flag indicating how the cross selling dialog is to appear

Flag indicating whether an availability check is to be performed

Assign the cross selling profile to a sales area, document scheme, and customer scheme.

Activities

In order to determine which products are most frequently purchased together, you can use report SDCRSL01 (transaction SE38) to analyze sales orders for a specified period time (for example, for the previous 30 days). The system will search through all the orders, list all the articles purchased, and how often certain pairs of articles (or even three or more) appeared in the same sales order: for example, 10% of the time, customers purchased a specific shirt-and-tie combination. In this way, you can mine the R/3 database to find article combinations that might not have occurred to you (for example, a movie and a CD with the sound track for the movie.

Alternatively, you can manually assign combinations of articles for cross selling purposes, based on other information you may have.