12:02Maria Wendt · Tutorial
The $14M funnel: content, a link, a checkout page
Maria Wendt draws out the exact three-step funnel behind her digital product sales — no webinars, no sales calls, no automation stack.
September 8th 2025The argument in one line.
A single low-ticket digital product sale plateaus at its sticker price, but layering an order bump and a post-purchase upsell sequence onto the same checkout is what turns a $24 sale into a $180-plus average order.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You sell a low-ticket digital product (course, template, guide) under $50 and have never added an order bump or post-purchase upsell to your checkout.
- You use a cart platform like Samcart, ClickFunnels, or ThriveCart and haven't touched the order-bump or upsell-funnel settings.
- Your sales volume looks fine but revenue feels stuck, and you suspect the problem is average order value, not traffic.
SKIP IF…
- You already run order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells and want granular optimization detail — this video covers order bumps and upsells at an introductory level only.
- You sell services or high-ticket coaching rather than a self-checkout digital product; the funnel mechanics here assume a self-serve cart.
The full version, fast.
Digital product sellers who only sell the front-end product cap their revenue at the sticker price. Maria Wendt teaches the two checkout-flow levers that fix this: the order bump, a single add-on offer shown before checkout completes that raises the order total in place, and the upsell, a sequence of full sales pages shown after purchase, each with its own accept-or-decline decision. In her own funnel, a $24 course picks up a $47 order bump and several post-purchase upsells to reach $403 in a real example. Across her business she sees 50-60% of buyers take the order bump and 10-15% take each upsell, which lifts her average order value from $24 to $180. The conclusion: fix the offer stack behind the sale before spending more on traffic.
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00:00 – 00:41
01 · The four levers nobody teaches
Order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells named as the missing piece of low-ticket digital product businesses.
00:41 – 02:26
02 · Why no one teaches this
Her own arc from $63 in year one to $12M, and the claim that most pros either can't teach this well or benefit from buyers not knowing it.
02:26 – 03:34
03 · Free book offer (first CTA)
Points viewers to a free 88-page book covering the full system beyond what fits in one video.
03:34 – 04:44
04 · The $24 to $403 quadrant
Draws a 2x2 diagram live — Order Bumps, Upsells, Downsells, Cross-sells — framing a real customer's path from $24 to $403.
04:44 – 05:52
05 · Order bump vs. upsell, defined
Order bump = bumps the total before checkout completes; upsell = separate sales page shown after purchase.
05:52 – 07:43
06 · Live checkout walkthrough
Screen-share of an actual checkout: $24 course, $47 order bump takes the total to $71, then a sequence of upsell sales pages (Everything-Done-For-You Content Pack, Millionaire Business Dashboard, a 'Wait, before you go' downsell-style page) building to $403 total.
07:43 – 09:08
07 · The conversion-rate math
Real benchmarks: order bumps convert 50-60%, upsells 10-15%, lifting average order value from $24 to $180 across 3,000+ monthly customers.
09:08 – 10:36
08 · Wrap-up and book CTA
Repeats the free book offer as the closing ask, framed as the deeper resource for readers who want to go beyond order bumps and upsells.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- An order bump is added before checkout completes and bumps the order total in place; an upsell is a separate sales page shown only after the first purchase is made.
- In one real example, a $24 front-end sale grew to $403 after one order bump and a sequence of post-purchase upsells.
- Order bumps convert at 50-60% in this business, meaning roughly half of all buyers take the single add-on offer shown at checkout.
- Upsells convert at 10-15% per offer shown, lower than order bumps because each one requires a separate purchase decision after the sale is already complete.
- Adding order bumps and upsells lifted average order value from $24 to $180 across the business — an over 7x increase on the same traffic.
- A $12M digital product business can be built on a $24 front-end offer once the back-end order bump and upsell sequence is accounted for.
- The math behind high-revenue low-ticket businesses only makes sense once you see the full cart value, not the advertised sticker price.
- A downsell-style page (framed as 'wait, before you go') can appear inside the same post-purchase sequence as the upsells, offering a lower-priced version of a declined offer.
- Three or more sequential upsell pages after a single purchase is a normal structure for a low-ticket funnel, not an outlier tactic.
Two checkout-flow levers turn one sale into hundreds of dollars.
WHAT TO LEARN
An order bump shown before checkout and an upsell sequence shown after purchase can lift average order value by more than 7x on the same traffic, without changing the front-end price.
01The four levers nobody teaches
- Order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells are the four checkout-flow levers that separate a stuck low-ticket business from a scaling one.
02Why no one teaches this
- A business can go from $63 in its first year to $12M largely on the strength of its order-bump and upsell stack, not the front-end price.
03Free book offer (first CTA)
- A single video can only cover a fraction of a funnel system — treat any one breakdown as a starting point, not the complete playbook.
04The $24 to $403 quadrant
- Mapping offers into a before-purchase / after-purchase quadrant makes it clear which lever (bump vs. upsell) belongs at which stage of checkout.
05Order bump vs. upsell, defined
- An order bump modifies the current order before it's placed; an upsell is a wholly separate sale made immediately after the first one completes — mixing up the two misplaces where an offer belongs in the flow.
06Live checkout walkthrough
- A single $24 sale realistically expands to $400+ through one bump plus three or four sequential post-purchase offers, each with its own price point.
- A vague or oddly-loading checkout element (like a broken bump image) doesn't necessarily hurt conversion if the offer and price are still clear to the buyer.
07The conversion-rate math
- Order bumps converting at 50-60% and upsells at 10-15% are healthy, provable benchmarks to compare your own funnel against.
- An AOV jump from $24 to $180 (7.5x) on the same traffic is what makes a low-ticket offer viable at scale — fixing the back end is often higher leverage than buying more traffic.
08Wrap-up and book CTA
- A deeper system (pricing, sequencing, automation of bumps and upsells) is usually documented somewhere more thorough than a single video can cover — worth tracking down before building your own funnel from scratch.
Terms worth knowing.
- Order bump
- A single add-on offer shown on the checkout page itself, before the buyer completes the purchase, that increases the order total in place.
- Upsell
- A separate offer presented as its own page immediately after a purchase is completed, requiring a new accept-or-decline decision.
- Downsell
- A lower-priced or repackaged version of an offer shown to a buyer who declined the preceding upsell, aimed at recovering some revenue from that same visit.
- Cross-sell
- An offer for a related but separate product shown alongside or after the main purchase, distinct from an upsell of the same core offer.
- Average order value (AOV)
- The average total a customer spends per order once every add-on, bump, and upsell they accept is included, not just the price of the front-end product.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“You cannot just sell products for $5 here, $24 here. You have to have these four very important things: order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells.”
03:30
“There was a $24 order, and then they added all these additional things to their cart, which brought the order total to $403.”
08:16
“Half the people checking out should be buying your order bump, and then your upsells, 10 to 15 percent.”
08:37
“This is how we have increased our average order value from $24 to $180.”
Word for word.
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analogy
00:00If you want a profitable, a long term profitable digital products business, you cannot just sell products for $5 here, $24 here.
00:10You have to have these four very important things, and they're called order bumps, upsells, downsells, and crosssells.
00:30So these are additional products that your customers purchase after they've agreed or decided to buy the initial product. Most marketing pros, most digital product pros have probably never even mentioned this to you before.
00:46You might never have even heard of any of these before. And so in the digital products world, it's very unusual to hear of something anything about order rums, anything about upsells, anything about downsells, anything about cross sells.
00:58This is advanced stuff, and the reason most pros don't teach this is two reasons. One, it's a little complicated, so it's a little tricky to teach and to teach well, so bear with me.
01:10I'm gonna do a really good job teaching you everything that you need to know, but it's a more advanced topic, so even if they do know it, they might not know how to teach it well. That's the first reason.
01:20The second reason is that they benefit by you not knowing about things like order bumps, up sells, cross sells, down sells. They benefit by you not knowing it.
01:28I am not benefiting. I'm the opposite of not I'm not benefiting, I'm losing by teaching you this, by sharing this information with you.
01:38It would be better if less people knew this because, in my honest opinion, this is a huge part in how you have a profitable low ticket digital product business. And so they're not not only is it hard to teach and hard to teach well, but there's also no incentive to teach it.
01:52And to be honest with you, the only reason why I'm teaching all of this is because I have committed to creating the resources that I wish I knew about when I was just getting started. In my first year of business, when I only made $63, you better believe I had no idea what an order bump was.
02:08I had no idea what an upsell, all of that. $12,000,000 later, I know that most of my profit has come from order bombs upsells, etcetera, etcetera.
02:16And so I'm gonna teach you everything that you need to know because I'm honoring my commitment to showing up and teaching you exactly what you need to know to have a very successful digital product business. So what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna teach you about these two.
02:33So the first ones, I'm gonna teach you everything that you need to know about order bumps and everything that you need to know about upsells. Those are the ones that I'm gonna teach you. If you wanna dive deeper, which I recommend you do, I recommend you grab a free copy of my book, um, how I made this is a little like I I published it a month ago and I've hit 12,000,000 now, um, but how I made $11,000,000 selling digital products.
02:54It's really the complete guide to an automated business. I'll send you a copy of this for free. Drop my pen.
03:00Hold on. Hold on. We're losing things left and right over here.
03:03Um, I'll send you a copy for free. It's really it's just really helpful. There's a lot of stuff in there for you to know.
03:07Um, in this YouTube video, we're gonna be doing, like, what I consider to be, like, the tip of the iceberg or just what I can fit into one video, which is just the order bumps, just the upsells. Um, but that book that I'll send you a free copy of, the link's just in the description, it dives deep into everything that you need, literally this deep into everything that you need to know, and I highly highly highly recommend you let me send you a free copy, um, my gift to you.
03:31Let me pick up my pen really quick. Hang on. There we go.
03:35I dropped my little iPad pen. Um, okay. So the other thing that I'm gonna do that I think is really important is I'm gonna give you a real life example and show you how I took a customer from $24 to around $400.
03:47So I'm gonna show you what this looks like, and we're actually gonna do this first, um, just so that you can visualize what we're talking about here.
03:54So I go all the way up to the top. Okay. So this is an example of order bumps and upsells in action.
04:03So I'm gonna break down all of these little products for you so you understand what's happening here because you can kinda see generally what happened here. There was a $24 order, and then they added all these additional things to their cart, which brought the order total to $403.
04:18So if you can just, like, look at this, you can kind of visually understand what happened here. They first, bought the first product, and then they added all of these other things. I wanna teach you this process.
04:28This is what I want you to know in this video is how to do this so that you're not having $5 orders here, $24 orders here, like little orders. You're regularly having multiple hundreds of dollar orders because that is how you really, really scale a low ticket business.
04:46So, um, the first one is the actual product, so $24, that's the actual product.
04:54The second one here is what's called an order bump. So an order bump happens before the person checks out.
05:01So it literally bumps the order total up. That's why it's called an order bump. So the order bump is different than the upsell because they're bumping the order before they've checked out.
05:12They're adding something to their initial order. I'm gonna show you an actual example in a second here. Then we have all of these are upsells.
05:21So everything done for you, content pack, millionaire dashboard, all of these are called upsells, and these happen after the product is ordered. So we're gonna do, like, a little like, I'll show you what this kinda looks like, um, because this is upsells happen after they've checked out.
05:38So this one and this one happen before they check out, and then the rest happened after they check out. K? So let's diff so let me show you an example here on an actual checkout page.
05:49I think that's gonna be really helpful. Okay. So let me show you an actual checkout page here.
05:53So this is a very popular course. This is one of my primary, um, digital products. We've made millions of dollars with this product.
06:01It's just 24 courses for $24. And then if you scroll down so this is the main product.
06:08It's 24. Then you can see here we have this order bump. I don't know why it's not loading this image.
06:13Um, it's just it's just weird. It normally loads. Just ignore it.
06:17This is the order bump. I wish it was working of all the days. I wish it was working today because I'm literally showing you the order bump, but say love you, that's how it goes.
06:24So then we add this to order, and now do you see here that they haven't placed the order yet? So this is the order bump, because it's literally bumping the order total from $24 to $71 in this particular instance.
06:37So this is an order bump. Now this is very different. So we're gonna pretend that I placed my order here because I'm gonna pull up the other page that happens next.
06:45So this is what happens next. After I were to place the order, it would get taken to what's called an upsell sales page. So it looks like the the checkout progress is about 20%, so it would be like all the upsells, if you remember that full stack that we looked at, after they get seen every upsell page, then the order is like a 100% completed.
07:08And this particular product is called the everything done for you content pack, and it's just a sales page.
07:14It's it's a sales page for this, and then they can add it to their order, and that would add an additional $47 onto their order. And so I'll just click no thanks, I don't need this right now, so you can see an example of another one. And this, by the way, is an example of a down no.
07:30This is another upsell. So we said no. Thank you, and then it gets you get pitched another one, and then it kinda goes, like, on and on.
07:38But you can see here how it went from 20% to 40%. That's the upsell funnel. Now I wanna give you so essentially, like, really simply, that is how you go from a $24 order to a $400 order.
07:52Now I wanna give you the actual numbers, the actual data on on what to expect conversion rate wise. So what percentage of people who go through your checkout process should do what?
08:07So we have every month we add 3,000 new customers. We do literally thousands of sales, um, and the order bump conversion rate is 50%.
08:18So let me just add my iPad really quick back on here. So this one here, order bumps, 50% to 60% conversion rate.
08:27Expect that for your order bump, which means half the people checking out should be buying your, um, order bump, and then your upsells, 10 to 15%.
08:43This is how we have increased our average order value from $24 to a $180.
08:53What that means is every single person on average, now some people do a lot more, some people do less, but the average of every new customer or of every customer, like every order that someone buys from us is a 180.
09:08So people don't understand this. They're like, how have you sold millions, so they've sold $12,000,000 worth of products. How have you sold $12,000,000 worth of products if you're only charging $24?
09:18And when you're thinking about it that way, it would seem tricky to only be selling a $24 product. But this is why it's so important that you show the full picture because it becomes a lot the math starts to make a lot more sense when you're realizing that many of my customers are giving me $400, And all of my students who are in my different coaching programs are we teach them to do upsells, um, because that and order bumps and cross sells and all of that, um, because that is what adds the profit.
09:48That is what takes a $24 customer and turns them into a $400 customer. Um, if you wanna dive deeper into all of this, again, I highly, highly, highly recommend. Let me just like show you a little sneak peek of this book.
09:59Because if you're watching a video like this, I mean, have my like flop to viral scale. If you're watching a video like this, what that tells me, I also have a ton of stuff by the way on automations in this book, which I recommend you grab, because that's also very cool to do this stuff on autopilot. Some things that you need to know like about volume and margin and stuff, which is just good to know.
10:18Like it's a great book. I highly recommend you grab a copy of it. If you're watching a video like this that tells me that you're very committed to the process of having a successful digital product business, and just sitting down and like reading this book, I think it's gonna be really helpful to you.
10:31So just get that down in the description, and that's where I'll see you.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Maria Wendt opens with a blunt claim: a low-ticket digital product business built on the front-end sale alone doesn't scale — and walks through the exact checkout-flow levers, and the real numbers, that took one of her $24 sales to $403.
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:14model
Order Bump / Upsell / Downsell / Cross-sell quadrant
- Order Bumps
- Upsells
- Downsells
- Cross-sells
A 2x2 map of the four checkout-flow offer types, split by timing (before vs. after the initial purchase) and role (add to this order vs. sell a related product).
Steal forany self-checkout digital product cart
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
09:08link
“if you wanna dive deeper into all of this, I highly recommend you grab a free copy of my book”
soft, reciprocity-framed CTA repeated twice (early ~2:42 and again at the close ~9:08) rather than a single hard pitch; positions the book as 'my gift to you' and the video as the tip of the iceberg
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
