Appearance
Basket Upsell
Two things on your site try to grow a customer's basket before they pay: a suggestion card inside the basket, and a pop-up when they press Checkout. Both work out of the box and pick your best competition automatically. This page covers pushing one specific competition harder, changing how insistent the pop-up is, and reading the results.
Where to find it: Admin → Settings → Checkout → Upsell Settings, and the Always Push This Competition section on any competition's edit page.
What your customers see
The suggestion card sits inside the basket, under the items, showing one competition the customer isn't already buying with an Add button. It's always there (unless you switch it off) and never blocks anything.
The pop-up appears when the customer presses Checkout, offering up to three ways to add a little more. It opens with what's in their basket right now, then two groups: Round up to a tidier total, and Or add another competition for the featured one. The two are kept apart deliberately — a round-up is offering a basket total to reach, the featured competition is offering the price of one entry, and side by side in one list those two figures get read against each other as if they measured the same thing. Taking an option adds the tickets and carries on to checkout; declining goes straight through.
If nothing can fill the featured slot, the second group isn't shown at all and you get a third round-up instead.
Both surfaces only ever offer a competition the customer in front of them could actually buy right now: live, started, not sold out, no access code, and not free to enter. Competitions with entry requirements are left out of the automatic pick, but a competition you pin is still offered — to the customers who meet those requirements.
Push one competition harder
By default the site pushes your highest value live competition, favouring ones close to selling out or ending. If you want a specific competition pushed instead — typically a flagship car draw — pin it:
- Open the competition (Admin → Competitions, then Edit).
- Scroll to Always Push This Competition in the settings section and switch it on.
- Save.
A pinned competition takes the featured slot in the pop-up and becomes the suggestion card's pick, ahead of anything the site would have chosen on its own. It also skips the usual price checks — pinning is an instruction, so we don't second-guess it.
Pinning reaches beyond the basket. The same switch can also move a competition to the top of a competitions grid on your site, so browsers see it first and not just customers who are already checking out. That part is opt-in per grid: open the grid section in the page builder and tick Show pushed competitions first. See ordering the competitions grid.
Pinned competitions carry a megaphone next to their status in Admin → Competitions, so you can see what you're pushing without opening each one. It greys out when the competition isn't live, because a pin can only do something on a live competition. Hover it to see which of the two that is: a draft that will start being pushed when you set it live, or one that's finished and isn't being pushed any more.
On a long list you don't have to hunt for the megaphones. Admin → Competitions has a Pushed filter next to Active, Draft and Ended, with a count beside it, and it shows every pinned competition whatever state it's in. That's the quickest way to answer "what am I pushing right now", and to spot a pin you left on something that finished weeks ago.
You can pin as many competitions as you like. There's only one featured slot, so if more than one is pinned we push the strongest of them, using the same rules as the automatic pick below.
Three things worth knowing:
- A pin looks after itself. As soon as the competition sells out, ends, or is drawn, it stops being offered. There's no list to tidy up afterwards.
- Duplicating a competition doesn't copy the pin. A pin is about one specific live competition, so a duplicate starts unpinned — otherwise you'd quietly end up with two competing for the same slot.
- Entry requirements narrow a pin; an access code stops it. If the competition has entry requirements, we push it only to customers who meet them, and everyone else sees your next best competition. If it has an access code we can't offer it at all, because a customer arriving from a suggestion would have no way to enter the code. The switch tells you which of these applies.
Under the switch you'll see a line telling you which competition your site is pushing right now, and whether that's because you pinned it or because we picked it. That's a read-out, not a setting; it's there so you can see the default is doing something without having to guess.
If you pin nothing
Nothing breaks, and this is the expected state for most sites. The site picks your highest value live competition, breaking ties in favour of the ones closest to selling out or ending. In one sentence: your highest value live competition, favouring ones close to selling out or ending.
Change how insistent the pop-up is
Go to Admin → Settings → Checkout and click Upsell Settings. Four settings, all of which have a sensible default:
Suggestion Card in the Basket
On by default. Switch it off to remove the card entirely; the pop-up is unaffected.
Checkout Pop-up
- Only for a strong offer (the default) — the pop-up appears when there's genuinely something worth interrupting for: a competition you've pinned, or a clear step up from what the customer is already buying. Weaker suggestions still appear on the basket card, just not as a pop-up.
- Every checkout — maximum pressure. Fair warning: most baskets on sites like yours are small, so a pop-up on every single order can cost more in abandoned checkouts than it earns in extra tickets. Worth watching your checkout conversion for a week after switching to this.
- Never — no pop-up at all. The suggestion card still shows.
Quiet Period After "No Thanks"
Default 30 minutes. When a customer dismisses the pop-up, we leave them alone for this long rather than asking again on their next basket. Thirty minutes covers the rest of a shopping visit without muting tomorrow's order. Set it to 0 to ask every time.
Suggesting Another Competition
This one only governs the pop-up's Or add another competition card. It sets how much more a ticket has to cost than the one the customer is already buying before that competition is worth offering.
- Small step up — about twice their current ticket price. Shows on the widest range of baskets.
- Balanced (the default) — about three times their current ticket price. Someone buying 20p tickets won't be shown anything under about 60p.
- Only a big step up — five times or more. Keeps the card for your flagship draws, so it shows less often.
This is measured against the customer's own basket and your own ticket prices, not a fixed pound figure, so it tunes itself to your site: on a site where most tickets are 20p, a £1 ticket counts as a genuine step up, whereas on a site where most tickets are £2 it doesn't.
Two things worth knowing:
- It never applies to a competition you've pinned, but pinning doesn't retire it. A pin takes the card outright for the customers who can be offered it, and this setting decides the card for everyone else. That's a bigger group than it sounds: anyone already buying your pinned competition, anyone who's reached its ticket limit, and anyone who doesn't meet its entry requirements all fall through to this. If you pin your flagship draw, the customers most likely to see this setting at work are the ones who already bought it.
- It can't leave the pop-up short. If nothing on your site clears the bar, the card becomes another round-up instead. So a stricter setting trades a featured competition for an extra round-up, not for an empty space.
There's a ceiling you can't set, too: a competition can be too expensive for a basket as well as too cheap, so a £5 ticket won't be pushed at a 30p basket however you set this. That limit scales with the basket and looks after itself.
Quantity discounts and the pop-up
If you use quantity discounts ("buy 15, save 20%"), the pop-up will sometimes offer a customer the tickets they need to reach the next tier — but only when doing so actually earns you money.
That caveat matters more than it sounds. A quantity discount reprices every ticket on that line, so pushing a customer to the threshold can cost you. Take a 49p competition with 20% off at 15 tickets:
| Customer has | Pays now | Pays at 15 with the discount | You earn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 tickets | £5.88 | £5.88 | nothing |
| 14 tickets | £6.86 | £5.88 | £0.98 less |
At 12 tickets you'd be giving away three extra entries into the prize draw for no extra revenue. At 14 you'd be talking the customer into paying you less. So the pop-up won't steer anyone toward a tier in those cases.
The "add N more to save X%" note on the ticket slider is unchanged and still shows those tiers — that cliff edge is the whole point of quantity discounts, and a customer who finds it themselves is a happy customer. It's only the pop-up that won't actively push it.
If a competition you've pinned and a quantity discount are both in play, the pin wins the featured slot.
See whether it's working
Money earned appears on your dashboard as upsell revenue, split by where it came from: the basket suggestion card, the checkout pop-up, and Play Again on the payment success page.
Offers shown, taken and declined are tracked in Website Analytics as four events:
| Event | Meaning |
|---|---|
Upsell Offered | A suggestion was shown |
Upsell Accepted | The customer added the tickets |
Upsell Declined | The customer dismissed the pop-up |
Upsell Suppressed | Nothing was shown, and why |
Upsell Suppressed is the one to look at if you think the feature isn't doing anything, because it tells you why it stayed quiet — no competition was eligible, the offer wasn't strong enough for your current pop-up setting, the customer had recently declined, or you've switched that surface off.
Each event records whether the competition was pinned, so you can compare how your pinned pushes perform against the ones the site picks itself.
Who can change these settings
| Role | Push a competition | Change upsell settings |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Yes | Yes |
| Shop Manager | No | Yes |
| Marketing | No | View only |
Marketing can see the upsell settings but not change them, because they affect what customers are charged at checkout.
Pinning is part of editing a competition, so it follows normal competition edit permissions — which today means Admin only. Worth knowing if you've given someone Shop Manager to run your merchandising: they can change every setting on this page but can't pin an individual competition.
Every change to the upsell settings is recorded in your system logs.
Troubleshooting
The pop-up never appears. Check Checkout Pop-up isn't set to Never, then look at Upsell Suppressed in Website Analytics for the reason. The most common one is that the offer wasn't strong enough for the Only for a strong offer setting — if you want it firing regardless, switch to Every checkout.
The suggestion card is empty. Every offerable competition is already in the customer's basket, or you have no other live competitions. Competitions with an access code are never suggested, since the customer couldn't complete the purchase, and ones with entry requirements are only suggested if you've pinned them.
My pinned competition isn't showing. Work down this list:
- Confirm it's still live, started, not sold out and not drawn. A pin doesn't override any of those.
- Check it has no access code. A competition with an access code is never offered, pinned or not — the switch will tell you so.
- Check its entry requirements. A pinned competition with requirements is only pushed to customers who meet them, so you won't see it yourself unless your own account qualifies. The switch tells you when this applies.
- If you've pinned more than one competition, only the strongest gets the featured slot. The read-out under the switch names whichever one is winning.
The featured competition looks too cheap. Set How Big a Step Up to Feature to Only a big step up, or to Small step up if you want it featuring smaller jumps more often. If you want a specific competition regardless of price, pin it — pins skip the price checks entirely.