Setting up a cart upsell overlay to convert one-time buyers to subscribers

The Recharge Cart drawer overlay gives you powerful upsell capabilities within the cart. These fully customizable features let you seamlessly convert one-time purchases to subscriptions with full upsell analytics and expandable options for future cross-sells and other features. You can also refer to the Recharge Cart article to learn more about delivering a fully managed shopping experience with built-in upsell capabilities.

This guide highlights the key features of the Cart drawer overlay and provides setup instructions.

Before you start

• The Cart drawer overlay is built to work with the Recharge Cart. Recharge strongly recommends enabling the Recharge Cart when using the Cart drawer overlay.

How it works

The Cart drawer overlay displays a subscription upsell modal when a customer adds a one-time purchase product to an eligible subscription plan. 

This modal is a pre-cart drawer that appears as a separate overlay before the actual cart. It prompts the customer to switch their one-time purchase to a subscription. 

If the customer accepts, the cart updates in real-time with the selected subscription details. Products already added as subscriptions do not trigger the overlay.

To prevent repeated prompts, Recharge stores a cookie per product when the modal appears. This cookie lasts for 24 hours, during which the overlay does not reappear for the same product. The flow encourages subscription adoption while minimizing shopping friction.

Key features

Drive more subscribers the moment customers add to their cart:

• Trigger upsells right before the cart: Encourage subscription upgrades when customers add a product to their cart
• Create a branded experience: Highlight subscription program benefits with branded banners, tailored messaging, and strategic colors.
• Track your performance: Monitor key metrics and optimize offers to drive more conversions.

Use cases

Review the following use cases to understand how you can use the Cart drawer overlay feature to improve key metrics and optimize offers to drive more conversions:

Set-up instructions

Activate the Cart embed on your Shopify theme

You must enable the Cart app embed in your storefront before customizing your Cart drawer overlay.

1. Click Cross-Sell & Upsell in the Recharge merchant portal and select Cart drawer overlay.
2. Select Configure app embed block and then click Configure app embed block to toggle the Cart embed on in your live theme automatically. This allows the theme to support an active Cart overlay strategy.
3. Click the Save button present on the top right corner of the Shopify theme editor page.

Set up and customize your Cart drawer overlay flow

Step 1 - Create the flow

 Create your Cart drawer overlay strategies:

1. Click Cross-Sell & Upsell in the Recharge merchant portal and select Cart drawer overlay.
2. Click Create cart drawer overlay if this is your first time, or click Create new if you already have other strategies.

3. Click Manage settings to rename the flow and add a description.

   

Step 2 - Configure the nodes 

Recharge offers a prebuilt template for your cart drawer flow. Review each node in the flow to understand how it works, and make adjustments where possible.

Step 1 - Review the Trigger node

The flow starts with a Trigger node, which activates when a customer meets specific conditions. Recharge automatically sets these trigger conditions for the Cart drawer overlay flow. You cannot edit these conditions.
 

Step 2 - Review the Cart drawer overlay node

Use the Cart drawer overlay node to control what customers see in their cart drawer overlay.

1. Click the Cart drawer overlay node.

2. Recharge sets Upsell one-time to subscriptions as the default and only available offer type for this flow.

   

    

3. You have two options for handling delivery frequencies in subscriptions. The first option No, the subscription will be added with its default frequency automatically uses the default frequency set on your product details page. The second option Yes, customer can choose their frequency allows customers to choose their preferred frequency.
4. Click the Customize cart drawer overlay button to access the cart builder and customize the cart look. You can use the different options present in the builder to:
   • Personalize the banner text, fonts, banner background color, and text colors to match your brand
   • Show discounts, free shipping, savings, or other exclusives for subscribers
   • Customize your button layouts including text, color, and style, to match your brand

   • Add images and icons to highlight subscription perks

     

5. Click Apply to save your conditions.

Step 3 - Save and activate the flow

Once you have finalized the configuration of the Cart drawer overlay strategy, save and activate the flow:

1. Click Save in the top right corner to save the flow.
2. Click Activate when you are ready to go live with the flow.

Considerations

Consider the following when using the Cart drawer overlay: