System and Method for Incorporating Packaging and Shipping Ramifications on Net Profit/Loss When Up-Selling

Abstract

An up-sell and down-sell method and system that considers a ranking of the individual marginal profit/loss of adding every product SKU of a merchant to an order (or a certain subset of SKU's based on other criteria), considering not only certain traditional fixed metrics the merchant may define such as product gross margins, credit card fees and labor costs (the cost of the pick)—but most importantly, variable packaging and shipping costs as well. In particular, the invention focuses on the packaging and shipping ramifications of up-selling every potential merchant SKU (or a certain subset of SKU's based on other criteria) to customer's order and down-selling each item already in customer's order. Once an adjusted net profit/loss ranking by SKU is available that considers variable shipping and packaging ramifications of up-selling such SKU to an existing order, a merchant can then determine to factor such ranking in how it up-sells or down-sells—including but not limited to up-selling certain SKU's and not others, structuring different discounts on different SKU's and potentially incentivizing customers to delete certain items in their order.

1 . A system to up-selling goods or services to a customer order, the system comprising:
 a memory configured to store information related to customer order; and   a processor configured to process the stored information related to the customer order, the processor being configured to perform operations comprising:
 receiving, with at least one processor, information related to a customer order for goods or services; 
 determining, with at least one processor, a first cost related to shipping and packaging the customer order; 
 determining, with the at least one processor, information related to at least two options associated with the customer order to present to the customer for up-selling additional goods or services related to the customer order, the at least two options being associated with information for a net profit metric, the net profit metric including information for at least one of a profit and a loss associated with the at least two options; 
 determining, with the at least one processor, a second cost related to shipping and packaging the additional goods or services with the customer order; 
 determining, with the at least one processor, an incremental packaging and shipping cost at least from the first and second costs, the incremental packaging and shipping cost relating to a cost for packaging and shipping the additional goods or services with the customer order; 
 determining, with the at least one processor, an adjusted net profit for up-selling the additional goods or services with the customer order, the adjusted net profit being determined at least from the net profit metric and the incremental packaging and shipping cost; 
 ranking, with the at least one processor, the at least two options to present to the customer for up-selling the additional goods or services related to the customer order based on the adjusted net profit; and 
   presenting, for a graphical user interface (GUI), information for the at least two options based upon the ranking.