Increase the AOV of an online store

The Average Order Value (AOV) is the average amount a customer spends per transaction. Here’s the formula:

Two Ways to Increase AOV

In essence, it’s quite simple. There are only two ways to increase AOV:

1. Getting customers to buy more products per order.
2. Getting customers to buy higher-priced products per order.
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Strategies to Increase Your AOV

To help you get started with leveraging this metric, I’ve outlined a few options below:

Increase the Free Shipping Threshold
A straightforward way to do this is by raising the minimum order amount for free shipping. Take your current AOV, add 10% or 20%, and set that as the new minimum order amount for free shipping.

Time- or Stock-Sensitive Deals
Create urgency with high AOV deals by offering discounts or gifts that are either available for a limited time or in limited stock. Think of "Product Drops" with limited editions.

Cross-Sells
Show complementary products relevant to the visitor. Think of recommendations, checkout add-ons, “shop the look,” or “others also bought.”

Upsells
Display better (and more expensive) versions of the same product type, and encourage visitors to choose the superior option.

Bundles / Sets
Identify products that are often purchased together, whether directly or after some time. Check your data for this. Then, create a new product that consists of these frequently bought items and promote it.

Tiered Discounts
Offer tiered discounts to entice customers to buy in larger quantities.

Bulk Orders
Offer products in larger package sizes as well. For example, a pack of 4, 8, or 12.

These are just a selection of strategies you can apply. There are many possibilities for where to implement these. For instance, did you know that adding a loyalty program can positively impact AOV and that email marketing can also contribute to this goal?
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Example: Home Décor Online Store

However, there’s no such thing as an “average” customer. Let’s take a home décor online store as an example.

The store sells the following products:

The distribution of customers is as follows:

In this example, the store has an average order value of €157 (€47,238/300 orders).

In the example below, you can see how the AOV increases drastically by selling more corner sofas and coffee tables.

How do you achieve this? By prioritizing the promotion of these two higher-priced product categories in your email marketing and paid advertising.

In the example above, the number of orders remains at 300. This scenario occurs by reallocating part of the marketing budget from curtains and investing it in corner sofas and coffee tables (which is why the number of curtains sold has dropped to 75).
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This is one of the four levers you can use to increase revenue.