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3 simple methods to grow your average order value

Growing an average order value is one of the main goals of any e-commerce business. This can be simply done by scaling the prices of the products – but that is not the way to go about it.

To have a higher AOV (Average Order Value), one of the best ways to do it is by selling more products with one order. Additionally, offering services like gift wrapping for an additional fee can quickly increase your AOV.

This method is well known, and we will share a few examples in the following chapters of the article.

What are the three simple ways to grow your average order value?

The best way to do it is by making appropriate changes to the website. Adding options to upsell a product, offer various additional services,… Anything helps.

The second way is by offering post-purchase offers – immediately after the purchase has been completed. This can be done in multiple ways, and we will go through the most popular ones.

The third way is to optimize your overall costs of selling a product – which is easier said than done.

Changes on your website

Changes on your website can be done quickly just to test if some of the suggestions below will help increase your cart’s average order value. Some of them are more elaborate than others, but all have been tested and shown incredible results.

One of the options is to offer to buy multiple products for a lower price – a bulk discount, in a way. This upselling method focuses on selling 2 or 3 pieces of the same product – as long as there is more than one product in the cart.

An example of this would be something like the below example:

Upselling like Amazon does is also a good example that can grow your AOV. Upselling products complementary to the one the customer is looking at right now is a perfect way of doing it.

Buying a flashlight? Do you need extra batteries? As simple as that.

There are also multiple options to upsell products at the checkout. Simply offer a surprise gift for a minimal price, a chocolate bar with a high-profit margin, and a low price for the end consumer.

Besides upselling products, you can also offer additional services that can be priced as a fee. Some of them include offering gift wrapping, superior shipping, advanced warranty, and much more.

Just like with products, these fees need a low price to have customers add them to their order impulsively.

Post-Purchase offers

Offering a special offer just after the purchase has been completed can have amazing results on the AOV. Customers that once bought on a specific online shop are 40% more likely to buy again.

Customers develop trust in the site, quality of the products, and reassurance that they will 100% be satisfied with what they ordered.

A typical thank-you screen after an online purchase lists basic information about the order, order confirmation, and a few more details.

What if you, instead of that, offer a product with a special offer – a 60% discounted product? And that product is complementary to the one just bought. The chances of upselling this product are high and sometimes as high as 40%.

This type of upselling that grows your average order value is done on the website itself. But there are other ways of doing this.

Offering a post-purchase offer can be done via text messages or emails. Due to the fast open rate of text messages, they are preferred as an upsell method after purchase. 93% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes of receiving them!

Whether it be with text messages or emails – the same idea applies: once somebody completes the order on your site, offering them special discounts via any of these channels brings you amazing results.

That is because the marketing costs for sending text messages or emails is far lower than with Facebook or Google ads!

Optimize costs

Simple to say, hard to do. Optimizing cost at any part of the complete Ecommerce business chain is great, but doing it effectively is a completely different ballpark.

Ecommerce companies have various types of expenses, including marketing, delivery, warehouses, and much more.

These are monthly operating costs, and the higher the number of orders, the higher the costs. This means that a minor change in the costs from a specific service provider can significantly impact the whole chain of operations.

This is especially important when the company grows and gets over 1000 orders daily.

One of the factors is the costs of servers, marketing channels, software solutions, and domains,… And sometimes, it turns out that a lot of the domains are not used, that there are new, better software solutions, and that there is a new server technology that is actually faster and cheaper than the current one.

All of these minor details can profoundly affect the workings of the complete company. Although going through all the services and trying to find cheaper solutions is not really possible, having experts around you who can advise you on the best solutions is one of the best things you can do for your eCommerce business.

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