One of the best ways to improve the ROI of every facet of your digital marketing is to improve your average order value (AOV). Assuming your marketing efforts stay the same, you’ll be able to see a larger return on your ad spend, email, sms, etc… because people will be ordering more products or higher priced products without drastically changing the cost-per-purchase.

Product Bundles

Are you selling multiple products that complement each other? Perfect! One of the most successful ways to increase your average order value is to offer bundle pricing; something along the lines of “Save 10% when you buy all three!” In general, people are bargain shoppers which means that most people will jump at the opportunity to save some money on the products they want. When you’re selling multiple items that go together, oftentimes people will only order one of the products. By bundling those products together and offering a deal, people are much more likely to buy all of the products together instead of just buying one of them.

To illustrate this example, think of bundling a T-shirt and a pair of pants together to make a complete outfit.

Not selling multiple products that go together? No problem!

Instead of building complementary product bundles, you can implement a similar strategy to increase over values by building multiples of the same products for a great deal. Let’s go back to the T-shirt and pants example. Instead of bundling a shirt and pants, you can bundle multiple colors of the shirts together; “Save 10% when you order your three favorite colors!”
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PRO TIP: Do both of these examples and see your conversions skyrocket!

Free Shipping Thresholds

One of the best ways to drive up your average order value is to test and optimize your free shipping threshold. In the era of free two-day shipping (shoutout to Amazon), people are more sensitive to shipping times and costs than ever before! Think about it… How many times have you filled your cart with $40 worth of products only to get served with $8 in shipping or free shipping at $50? And how many times have you gone back and added something else to your cart? If you’re like most people, probably more than once!

By optimizing your free shipping threshold to encourage multi-product orders, you’ll be able to play into customer emotional behaviors to transition their shopping budget from paying for shipping to simply buying more products. Plus, more often than not, those orders will cross the free shipping threshold by quite a bit!

PRO TIP: If you’ve never added a free shipping threshold, a great starting point is typically 10-20% above your current average order value. Start there and test different thresholds to see performance!

Product Organization

A highly under-utilized growth strategy is a product organization optimization. By strategically organizing your products you’ll have more control over which products people see first. By showing the best sellers (not the cheapest!) or the most value-packed products sooner rather than later, you’ll be able to help people increase the speed of their purchase process (boosts conversion rate) and you’ll be able to guide your customers to products that you want them to buy. When you do this, do it strategically and based off of actual data, not just randomly or with your most expensive product. 

To help guide your customers, structure your homepage to have featured products and higher value collections shown higher up so people see those products sooner when they scroll. The next best place to help guide customers is on your menu. When you add menu item dropdowns that link to products/collections, add the higher value products first. Shoppers are navigating your website quickly so they are more likely to click on the top of the menu than any other place on the menu.

Up-sells And Suggested Products

A popular but drastically underutilized strategy for increasing your e-commerce store’s average over value is up-selling your customers with suggested products. Many stores have a suggested product section on the product page, but far too often, stores show products from the same collection. This creates an either/or situation for your customers instead of an and/or. By showing related and complementary products, you can help your customers add more products to the cart, quickly.

Another great way to up-sell your customers is with a “Frequently Bought Together” section. By using an app like Frequently Bought Together, you can show your customers what other people purchased along with the products they are interested in. Amazon does this, and if it’s good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for you! 

With these four strategies, you can start increasing your average order value on Shopify and have your most profitable days ever. As with any major changes, we recommend doing things one-by-one so you can really see the difference that each individual piece makes. Also, just like any other growth strategy, these results are not instant, so give it time and make sure that you give your store enough time to really see an impact.