Rabwāh Having previously worked in fast food management, retail, and marketing I’ve come to have a firm understanding of upselling. Whether it’s suggesting cheese or a combo meal, “complete the triangle”, or reccomending high margin accessories, I’ve done it all. In fact, just last month we were remarking how much money the local Thai place could make if they started asking people what they wanted to drink instead of just serving water.

There’s a concept in upselling that I like to refer to as the grab 5 principle. I call it that because as a teenager at Best Buy, the best way to sell somebody an extra ink cartridge with their printer is to reccomend that they buy 5. This way, the most common response is “I’ll take one.” It’s upselling by absurdity – and it works.

When using this technique though, you have to be careful. It IS possible to overdo it. Let’s take a look at how GoDaddy does it.

Earlier today I was looking to buy a new domain name, and gave GoDaddy a try. After finding a name that was available, GoDaddy reccomended to me that I should also buy the .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us names as well. Since my name is for a potential company, I decided that I needed to protect my brand by registering all it’s variants.

If you look at the image below though, they then suggested 25 more similiar domain names I should buy. I figured that Google does this so that nobody can have a similiar domain, so it’s probably a good idea if I do so too. It looks like they give a nice discount for doing a 10 year registration, and it’s rumored that Google looks at length of registrations as a ranking factor, so I’ll be going the 10 year route.

The next page asks if I want to order the standard (no extra charge), deluxe, or protected plan. Wanting the business registration and expiration protection I opted for the extra $25/year protected plan.

I hadn’t thought about hosting yet, but thankfully there’s the next page full of options.
$29.99/yr takes care of all my email for me.
Add in another $70 for somethign called Traffic Blaster (who doesn’t want traffic right? It’s cheaper than Adwords)
Since I’m taking orders online I might need a merchant account and shopping cart. Luckily, $50 is a good deal compared to the competition.

Since the site isn’t ready yet, and it’s such a great domain name I might as well do the cash parking option. I’m spending a lot so making some money back while my domain sits there useless sounds good to me. Tack on $10 more.

So.. what’s my Total? Well, after adding in everything that GoDaddy suggested to me, It looks like I’m up to….

$18,061.31

At least I won’t have to go through that again for another 10 years.

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