If you sell PLR-based ebooks, planners or courses, the cheapest sale you’ll ever make is the second one, to a buyer who already has their card out. Upsells and cross-sells are how you ask for that second sale without being pushy. Done well, they hand buyers the next useful thing.
This guide walks through the tools Payhip actually gives you for this (cross-sells, upgrade discounts, bundles and related products), then shows how to build a sensible add-on path from PLR material, price it, keep it relevant and measure whether it’s working. Everything about Payhip’s features comes from its own help center and pricing page as of October 2026.
Upsell vs. cross-sell: the quick definitions
In everyday marketing language, an upsell nudges a buyer toward a bigger or better version of what they’re buying, and a cross-sell suggests a separate product that pairs with it.
Payhip uses its own terms, and they matter more than the textbook ones because they decide when your offer shows up. A Payhip cross-sell appears before the buyer pays for the promoted item. An upgrade discount appears after the purchase is finished. Keep that timing difference in mind as you plan your path.
What Payhip offers for upsells and cross-sells
Which plans include these tools
Payhip lists three plans as of October 2026: Free Forever ($0 a month plus a 5% transaction fee), Plus ($29 a month plus 2%) and Pro ($99 a month with no Payhip transaction fee). PayPal and Stripe charge their own processing fees on top. Payhip’s pricing page says every plan includes all features and that it doesn’t gate features by plan. Its pricing page doesn’t name cross-selling specifically, but by that statement the marketing tools below aren’t locked behind an upgrade. If that matters for your budget, confirm with Payhip support before you rely on it.
Cross-sells for digital and physical products
You set these up under Marketing → Cross Selling → Add Cross-Sell. You pick a trigger product, and when a buyer adds it to the cart, Payhip prompts them to add one or more promoted products at a discount you choose. Each cross-sell has its own percentage discount.
According to Payhip’s help article, here’s where the offer appears:
- Regular cross-sell: a notification after the buyer adds the trigger product to the cart or clicks Buy Now, plus a spot at the bottom of the cart.
- Prominent popup (optional): shown when a buyer clicks Add to Cart and then Checkout. It uses the product’s first cover image, and the popup copy is shared across all your cross-sells. Only the first cross-sell in your list is used for the popup.
- Exceptions: on desktop, Buy Now shows the regular cross-sell rather than the popup. On mobile, Buy Now shows no cross-sell at all. Payhip buttons embedded on another website won’t trigger the popup, though the regular cross-sell still appears.
Payhip itself warns that some customers dislike popups and suggests comparing conversions before and after you switch it on. Its 2025 feature round-up repeats that advice: test the popup on a few products first.
Circular cross-sells and stacked discounts
If Product A promotes Product B and B promotes A, you have a circular reference. By default, Payhip applies only the higher of the two discounts. A setting under the cog icon lets the percentages add together instead, so 50% and 20% would become 70% off one product. Check this setting before you build reciprocal offers, because it can wipe out your margin.
Cross-sells for courses, memberships, bundles and coaching
When the trigger is a course, membership, bundle or coaching product, Payhip uses a different setup. The add-on appears on the trigger product’s checkout page with a title, a description, a one-off price and an optional strikethrough price showing what the items would cost separately. Promoted items here can’t be physical or coaching products.
Upgrade discounts after purchase
Upgrade discounts live under Marketing → Upgrade. Once a buyer completes a purchase of the trigger product, Payhip offers a related product at a discount you set. If they don’t act right away, the offer is also included in their email receipt. You can limit the offer to a date range and customize its message.
There’s also a useful trick for older customers. Send an email update to past buyers that includes the [download_link] placeholder. When they open their download page, they’ll see a notice about their available upgrade discounts.
Bundles and related products
A Payhip bundle packages courses, digital products and memberships together under one price. You can give a bundle several pricing plans, including one-time, recurring, or a set number of payments. Related products is a quieter option. It shows a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of digital and physical product pages, filled from products that share a collection with the one being viewed.
Building a sensible upsell path from PLR products
The tools are the easy part. The harder part is deciding what to offer, and PLR sellers face a specific trap here: the same package often contains the ebook, the checklist, the worksheets and the graphics, and it’s tempting to chop it into as many paid pieces as possible.
Start with the job the buyer is trying to do
Ask what someone who just bought your ebook will struggle with next. A meal-planning ebook buyer may want a printable weekly planner. A buyer of a social media guide may want ready-to-edit post templates. The add-on should help them use what they bought, not just give them more of the same reading.
Common PLR-based add-on paths
- Ebook → workbook or checklist: turn the ebook’s key steps into fill-in pages. If your PLR pack includes a workbook, rewrite and redesign it so it matches your rebranded ebook.
- Single product → bundle upgrade: offer the ebook, workbook and a bonus resource together as a Payhip bundle, then promote the bundle from the single product. On Payhip, cross-sells that use a bundle as the trigger follow the separate setup described above. Pointing a digital product at a bundle uses the regular cross-sell setup.
- Front-end product → mini course: if you’ve turned PLR material into short video or email lessons, a course makes a natural step up from a single ebook.
- Personal-use product → expanded license: some sellers offer a higher-priced version with resale or rebranding rights. Only do this if your PLR license explicitly lets you pass on those rights, and spell out the terms you’re granting. Many PLR licenses allow you to sell the content but not to give buyers resell or PLR rights. Reread your license or ask the original seller. This is general information, not legal advice.
Keep the add-on clearly distinct
A good test: could the buyer get full value from the main product without the add-on? If the answer is no, the add-on probably belongs inside the main product. A good add-on saves time or effort. It shouldn’t be the chapter you held back.
Because other sellers may own the same PLR pack, edit and rebrand the add-on as thoroughly as the main product so the two clearly belong together.
Pricing the add-on
There’s no magic ratio, and anyone quoting you a guaranteed “upsell conversion rate” is guessing. A few practical principles help:
- Price it relative to the main product. An add-on that costs more than the item that triggered it is a hard sell at checkout.
- Use the discount to signal a one-time reason to act. Payhip’s cross-sells and upgrades both let you set a percentage off, so the add-on can have a normal price on its own page and a lower price when offered alongside the trigger.
- Show the savings on bundles. For course, membership or bundle checkout add-ons, Payhip’s optional strikethrough price lets buyers see what they’d pay buying separately.
- Account for fees. On Payhip’s Free Forever plan, the 5% transaction fee applies to the add-on too, on top of payment processor fees. Work out what you actually keep at the discounted price.
- Watch stacked discounts. Coupons, circular cross-sell settings and bundle pricing can combine in ways you didn’t plan for. Place a test order to see the final price.
Keeping offers relevant (and not annoying)
Relevance matters more than quantity. One well-matched offer usually reads as helpful, while three unrelated pitches feel like a gauntlet. A few habits help:
- Map each trigger product to one or two promoted products that solve the next problem, not to your entire catalog.
- Write the offer message from the buyer’s point of view: what the add-on helps them do.
- Use collections so the related products section shows genuinely similar items rather than random ones.
- Retire offers that no longer fit, such as a seasonal planner after the season ends. Payhip’s date-range option on upgrade discounts helps with this.
- Be careful with the popup on mobile-heavy traffic. Mobile Buy Now clicks don’t show any cross-sell, so design your buttons and test the actual path your visitors take.
Measuring results
Payhip’s Analytics dashboard shows a conversion rate plus three numbers behind it: views, started checkouts and completed checkouts. Payhip defines conversion as the share of visitors who start or complete checkout. The figures cover free and paid products and exclude your own logged-in views.
Overall conversion won’t tell you whether a specific add-on works, so keep a simple routine:
- Record your baseline numbers and your typical order value for a few weeks before turning an offer on.
- Change one thing at a time, such as turning on the popup, changing the discount, or swapping the promoted product, so you know what caused any shift.
- Look at your orders to see how often the promoted product sells alongside its trigger, and whether refunds or complaints rise.
- Watch for a drop in completed checkouts after enabling the popup. Payhip itself flags that as the trade-off to monitor.
The same idea on Gumroad
If you also sell on Gumroad, its help center describes a built-in Upsells tab on the Checkout page with three types. You can suggest an extra product, optionally with a discount. You can replace what’s in the cart with another product, which is handy for upgrading a buyer to a bundle that already contains their item. Or you can offer an upgraded version of the product in the cart. Gumroad shows the offer after the customer enters payment details and presses Pay.
Wrapping up
Upsells work best when they feel like good service. Give the buyer the next useful step at a fair price, and keep checking your numbers so you know whether it’s actually helping.
Sources
- Payhip Help Center: Cross Selling
- Payhip Help Center: Cross Selling For Courses, Memberships And More
- Payhip Help Center: Upgrade Discount
- Payhip Help Center: Product Bundles
- Payhip Help Center: Related Products
- Payhip Help Center: Conversion Rate
- Payhip: Pricing
- Payhip Blog: What’s New at Payhip: 2025 Feature Round-Up
- Gumroad Help Center: Creating an Upsell
Featured image: Photo: StockSnap (CC0)