10 Proven Techniques to Increase Your Store’s Average Order Value

You’ve started your eCommerce store, and you are marketing it. You’ve finally started selling a few products, but most of your orders average out to the same value, a low amount. Most of your customers checkout with the same order total and the same quantity most of the time.

It feels like your online store has hit its plateau and your revenue is pretty much stuck at the same point. What steps can you take to ensure that your average order value goes up?

Well, we are going to show you how to make your customers checkout with more products in their shopping cart and increase your overall order value.

Here are ten easy-to-implement strategies that will help you increase the average order value of your ecommerce store and encourage your customers to checkout with more products.

What is Average Order Value?

Your online store’s average order value is the average number of orders and money each of your customers ends up spending per transaction.  Here’s a simple formula to calculate your average order value.

Total Revenue/Number of orders = Average Order Value

You can either do this manually using the above-mentioned formula or you can use different Shopify apps that will automatically calculate the AoV for your store.

In order to boost your store’s average order value, you need to convince your customers to increase the number of items in their shopping carts before they checkout.

Check out the tips below to learn how you can actually encourage your customers to spend more on your online store.

1. Show Product Recommendations

Most of the times, customers are so focused on just one of your products that they completely ignore browsing your online store to find other products. This often leads to smaller shopping carts, and ultimately, lower average order value.

To help overcome this problem, you should add products recommendations to your checkout page and your product pages. By figuring out popular products, the ones that your customers often purchase, you can start adding other product recommendations to these product pages.

You can also scan the customer’s shopping cart and suggest other related products on the checkout page.

Use phrases like “Frequently bought together”, “Customers also bought”, etc to entice the customers into adding more products to their shopping carts.

2. Offer Free Shipping/Delivery Thresholds

For most of the online retailers offering free shipping can be quite a challenging task financially. However, setting free delivery over or at a certain threshold can help alleviate this problem.

For example, if you see that most customers are spending an average of $40 on your store and delivery costs you around $5, then you can set the free delivery at $50. You need to clearly display the required total amount to avail free delivery.

So, if you are offering free delivery over a certain threshold, you need to clearly show the message, something along the lines of “spend another $5 to get free shipping”, or “Get free delivery by spending $10 more”, etc.

Combine this trickery with relevant cross-sells and upsells to encourage the customers to avail free delivery and you will see your average order value shoot up.

3. Offer Bundles and Starter Packs

Bundles are a great way of offering and selling a number of products while simultaneously increasing the average order value of your online store.

Offer great bundles and saving packs to your customers with a bargain to get them to buy multiple products from your online store.

For example, if you own a clothing store. You can bundle different sets of clothes together to create a cost saving bundle.

You can bundle a shirt, pair of jeans, boots, etc together to create a bundle and offer it at 20% off of the total price if all these items were purchased separately.

This way you can offer great deals to your customers and they will be more likely to purchase such bundles increasing the overall average order value of your store.

4. Show Relevant Products

This is a similar strategy to showing popular products on your product and checkout page. However, with relevant products it means you need to show complimentary products to the ones that are in your customers’ shopping cart.

Instead of showing your customers the most popular products on your store, you should handpick the relevant items that compliment certain products. This means showing accessories with smartphones, showing shoe polish with a pair of shoes, etc.

Using certain strategies, you will be able to upsell and cross-sell different products which increases the number of products in your customers’ shopping carts. This way you can boost your average order value.

5. Display Cost Savings

This is a pretty easy technique that you can implement on your online store to increase the AoV. Users love saving money, they actively look for ways and methods to save money while shopping.

You can display cost savings on multiple items. You can offer discounts when a user buys a certain quantity of items.

For example, if a t-shirt costs $10, you can offer a 20% discount when the customer buys 3 of the same t-shirts or different t-shirts with the same price tag.

This will encourage the customers to buy multiple items to avail the discount which increases their shopping cart size and your AoV.

6. Implement A Loyalty Program

Implementing a simple and straightforward loyalty program on your online store will definitely help boost your average order value.

A simple point based loyalty program is often the best way to implement such programs. Just offer your customers a number of points for each $X they spend.

For example, you can offer 1 reward point for every $5 spent on your store, then you can offer rewards for spending the reward points like 100 reward points can be redeemed for a $10 gift card, etc.

This will entice your customers to spend more on your store since they will want to accumulate reward points and also people love being part of something. This also shows appreciation for your customers.

7. Offer Time Sensitive Deals

Time sensitive deals are a great way to create a sense of urgency an the fear of missing out in your customers. If a deal is time sensitive, then the customers are more likely to avail it.

You can show your customers time sensitive deals related to the products they have in their carts or just the most popular products on your store.

This works great specially on the cart page or the checkout page where you can show the customers a great deal that’s only available for an hour or so. This will set the clock ticking and the customers will often be hard pressed to avail it with their current purchase.

8. Use Live Chat to Increase Average Order Value

Answering customers’ queries and support questions instantly will definitely help you build trust with your customers and increase the upsell/cross-sell potential on your store.

It creates a great overall shopping experience for your customers while lifting your average order value at the same time.

Since live chat is instant, most customers prefer it over other modes of communication like email or telephone.

You need to have live chat representatives fully-trained and knowledgeable about all the store’s offerings. This way they can offer their help, suggest other products, etc which helps encourage your customers to make extra purchases.

9. Donations

Another great way to build trust and gain great PR is to donate some part of profits to a charity. This not only brings you more attention from the customers, but also shines a positive light upon your brand which in turn, brings in more sales.

Humble Bundle offers great bundles of games, comics, etc at “pay what you want” prices and donates most of the earnings towards a charity of your choosing.

This type of campaign encourages the buyers to spend more so they can donate more. It brings in more sales for your store and helps you gain some great PR as well.

10. Offer Gift Cards on Purchases

This is a surefire way to get your customers to come back for more. When your customers buy products of a certain value on your store, you offer them a gift card for their next purchase.

For example, when a customer makes a purchase worth of $50 on your store, you offer them a $5 gift card for their next purchase within a certain time period.

This will encourage your customers to come back within the specified time period to avail the gift card and make another purchase which ultimately increases the average order value of your online store.

Conclusion

Now it is your turn to implement these techniques and strategies to start boosting your average order value. You can either apply these strategies manually or you can use the Shopify app store to download apps that will help you implement these techniques within minutes.

If you are running into any problems or still have any question regarding your store’s average order value, or just want to provide simple feedback for this post, then leave a comment below.

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