I was thinking this might me a nice idea.
It might be nice to display the related products of the products that are currently in the shopping cart as a last chance to sell add-on or accessory products.
So let say you have a Ink Jet printer and a DVD burner in your cart, then related products like ink jet cartridges and blank DVD-R media would appear under the cart or perhaps as a sidebox.
I like it.
I do something similar now, and I’ll agree it has drawn a few sales of accessories. Mostly I set mine up this way because there is an extra step in my current cart that I couldn’t get rid of, and I figured here’s something I can do with this step.
However, when I do set up CS-Cart, I won’t do this initially. Having listened to several of the web-clinics at marketingexperiments.com, I’m of the opinion now that the fewer distractions (and fewer steps) between the customer’s decision to “go to checkout” and concluding the sale, the better. So I intend my checkout pages to be quite sparse, with only the forms needed, plus some reassurances (SSL cert, possibly brief testimonials, etc.) and try to streamline the checkout with as few distractions as possible. At least that’s the theory I’m working under right now … only time and experimentation will tell what works best.
It’s a good idea though, and regardless of what other’s tests have shown, what works best for each site is different. It would be a nice option to have.