Upselling or Upsetting? : The Interactive Effect of Cognitive Effort and Message Frame on Customer's Willingness to Accept an Upsell Offer

Upselling is a widely utilized sales tool especially in service industries like car rentals, hotels, and travel businesses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual clarification of the customer's decision process underlying an upsell choice as well as to give an an answer to the question of when and why consumers decide in favor or against an upsell offer. Drawing on the effort-accuracy framework and framing literature, we show that upsell arguments highlighting loss aspects moderate the relationship between effortful initial decisions and the probability of choosing the upsell.