5 Ways to Boost Average Order Value and Increase Your Ecommerce Revenue

Just make sure that the items you’re suggesting make sense with the products your visitors are trying to buy.

2. Bundle items together

Bundles are similar to cross-sells because they offer similar items together. However, instead of offering said items only when the customer adds something to their cart, bundles already exist in your ecommerce store as a feature or an item.

It’s so much easier to purchase more than one item when they already come pre-bundled together, or if you can get a better price for them.

This increases the perceived value of your products and will entice visitors to add more value to their cart before checking out.

There are two ways you can bundle items together. The first is a custom bundle offer, just like this one from La Petite Ourse.

If you purchase 20 cloth diapers, they offer a flat price of $295, which results in a cheaper per-item price.

Instead of offering a pre-made bundle, shoppers can pick and choose their own designs.

On the other hand, you can offer pre-existing bundles that shoppers can easily add to their cart. For example, Holo Taco offers several bundles, both for nail polish and nail care items, because they know that many customers will want to purchase more than one of these items, anyway.

Keep in mind that a bundle CAN be a good cross-sell or upsell idea, too.

3. Offer free shipping over a certain price threshold

It is so much more cost-effective for online shoppers to spend more – and thus increase your AOV – to qualify for free shipping.

This is especially true if you have shoppers from outside of your country who may have to spend more money on expensive shipping and customs import fees.

Let’s bring back that screenshot from Holo Taco. Notice their offer at the top:

Holo Taco is manufactured and shipped from the United States, but the website detects that I’m shopping from Canada. If my order value is over $99, I qualify for free shipping.

Now the big question is: how much should your customers spend for free shipping?

There’s no magic number or easy answer to this question because it depends on so many factors.

For example, the minimum order amount for free shipping should definitely be higher than your current AOV, especially if you want to increase it.

You should also consider your cost per sale. The more expensive your cost per sale, the higher the minimum order amount should be for free shipping.

But those aren’t the only considerations to take. How much does it cost you and your business to ship products? For example, Holo Taco decided to absorb all customs fees for Canadian orders, so shipping is actually very expensive for this brand.

With this in mind, it makes sense that the minimum order value required to get free shipping is so high.

If you don’t have a free shipping bar like in your store yet, you can add one using this template below.

Make a click on it to activate the preview mode and follow the prompts to add it to your website. Then just edit the copy and select the minimum order value based on your calculations.

Don’t look at other stores and decide you should do the same – evaluate your own situation and come up with a number that makes sense for your brand.

4. Add a loyalty program

So you want to increase your average order value, but what do your customers actually get in return for spending more and thus increasing that metric for you?

With a loyalty program, your customers will have yet another incentive to add more value to each order and get more rewards.

David’s Tea does this brilliantly. With their Frequent Steepers program, customers get a free 50g of tea for every $100 spent.

However, this $100 needs to be spent in a single month. This encourages customers to purchase higher values each time they make their monthly tea orders.

This doesn’t make sense for people who only occasionally drink tea. But for daily tea drinkers – or frequent steepers, hence the name of the program – this is a great value! It’s much more encouraging to bump your order up to $100 or more when you know you’ll get an extra bag of tea.

5. Test out pricing strategies

Every audience will have a different optimal pricing point. And without testing out your pricing strategies, you’ll never know what that is for YOUR audience.

There are no magic numbers here, unfortunately. Increasing or lowering your prices may work, but you won’t know until you try it.

For example, increasing your product prices could decrease your conversion rate, which would also increase your cost per sale. This isn’t so good, unless it dramatically increases your AOV.

On the other hand, if you decrease your prices, you could lower your AOV because items are cheaper, while also increasing your conversion rates. However, it could also lead to increasing your AOV because your customers may add more items to their cart due to the more affordable price points.

It’s difficult to know what will happen unless you try it yourself.

Do some research in your niche and see what other stores similar to yours are doing to get an idea of what your audience may be looking for.

Include AOV growth tactics in your marketing strategy

There you go – by trying these tactics, you will be able to increase your average order value and thus grow your ecommerce business.

If your AOV is going up, but your other metrics are going down too drastically, take a step back and reconsider what you are doing, because AOV is not the only metric that matters.

It’s okay for some of your metrics to go down, as long as your AOV is going up high enough in return.

For example, if your cost per sale used to be $10, and your AOV used to be $25, but now your CPS is $15 and your AOV is $50, that’s great!

But if your CPS rises to $30 and your AOV rises to $35, that’s… not so great.

While you work on increasing your average order value, you should also optimize your website to increase your conversion rate so that you get more orders, not just more valuable orders. You can do this by using Getsitecontrol popups to sell more items and capture email addresses of your visitors.