Published on
February 14, 2022
Profit is the ultimate goal of any business.
But increasing your ecommerce sales and revenue is no easy feat. There are so many variables in play: your product descriptions, your site speed and navigation, shipping options, the products themselves.
When thinking about increasing revenue, a lot of online stores will focus on increasing traffic and conversion rates. This may sometimes be counterproductive, especially if your customer acquisition costs are high.
Thankfully, there’s more than one way to increase your ecommerce store revenue:
Option number 1: Attract more shoppers (traffic + conversions).
Option number 2: Get your existing customers to spend more and increase their average order value (AOV).
In this article, we’ll focus on the latter and will show you some small changes and improvements you can make to your online store to increase your average order value.
But, before we dive into the tactics, let’s see what average order value (AOV) is and why is it so important for your online store.
The average order value is one of the key performance indicators for every e-commerce store. It indicates the average amount each purchaser spends each time they place an order.
The AOV helps you understand your customers’ behavior and can serve as a benchmark that helps you measure the success of your strategies and marketing efforts.
Here are some reasons why the AOV is so important for e-commerce stores:
The AOV formula is simple: divide your entire revenue by the total number of orders to arrive at your AOV. Here’s how that looks:
Sales Revenue / Number of Orders = Average Order Value
For example:
Are your store visitors able to find the items they’re looking for easily? Improving product search discovery is a must when it comes to enticing shoppers to spend more.
By making it easy for potential customers to find what they want, you’re removing friction from the buyers’ journey and making their experience more pleasurable.
One of the easiest ways to increase product visibility is visual search.
For example, let’s say you met a friend for a coffee. Your friend is wearing a knitted striped turtleneck, which you really like. You like it so much that you want to buy something similar.
The problem is, the striped turtleneck is last season, and your friend doesn’t remember where she bought it.
So, you immediately open your favorite online store and try to find a turtleneck just like the one your friend is wearing.
When you type in “knitted striped turtleneck” in the search bar, you’re getting a lot of results, but nothing looks quite like the one you’re searching for.
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to snap a a photo of your friend and upload it to the search bar to see if there’s anything similar without having to go through hundreds of results?
When you allow customers to submit a photo and browse aesthetically comparable results, you encourage impulse buys and enable shoppers to purchase based on their individual tastes, as opposed to browsing broad product categories in the hopes of finding something they want (and ultimately giving up).
Free shipping is always a great motivator and helps you not only widen your customer base, but also increase the value of your orders.
In fact, according to a 2020 Statista analysis, excessive delivery prices were the leading cause of cart abandonment at 63%.
To use the free shipping incentive to encourage buyers to add additional items to their carts and therefore increase your AOV, simply introduce a free shipping threshold.
For instance, you may provide free delivery on orders of $50 or more.
This is a standard method used by many online merchants to boost average order values.
Display or highlight similar items to your consumers whenever feasible to increase sales.
This might be as simple as displaying a list of products that go well together with the product that your customer views at a given moment.
Create an interface and product descriptions that make it apparent that your items are more valuable when purchased in combination with other items.
Suggested read: Drive Higher Conversions With AI-Powered Product Recommendations
See how AI-powered visual search can help you increase AOV
can help you increase AOV
See how AI-powered visual search can help you increase AOV
Harness the power of Visual AI
See how AI-powered visual search can help you increase AOV
Harness the power of Visual AI
See how AI-powered visual search can help you increase AOV
Harness the power of Visual AI
Use data to create tailored and targeted purchasing experiences.
Customers are more inclined to spend higher amounts of money if your offers a personalised, and bigger spend = higher average order value.
For example, you can examine the order history and on-site behaviour of a group of shoppers, and then create campaigns to promote items that appeal to that specific audience.
Suggested read: How E-Commerce Personalization Can Boost Conversions by Using Visual AI
While it may seem contradictory, offering discounts can assist in increasing your average order value.
The key is ensuring you include a minimum spend requirement. Used this way, the discount becomes a “reward” when a customer meets a certain threshold.
In the example from the screenshots, ASOS have set a minimum spend of £20.
You can additionally apply scaled price discounts or quantity discounts to encourage buyers to spend more.
Scaled price discounts are a type of discount where you apply a different discount depending on the spend, so the higher the spend the higher the discount. For example, if a buyer spends $100, they can get a discount of 10%, and if they spend $200, they can get a discount of 15%. Volume or quantity discounts on the other hand are applied when a buyer buys more of the same item.
Introducing time-sensitive bargains are a great way to increase AOV.
Urgency helps raise conversions and average order value in a given period, even if it impact the order value in the long run. Limited time offers are excellent for expanding average order value when you're facing a quiet period in your online store.
They're also quite simple to put into action. Most e-commerce stores just add a banner at the top of their website to announce them.
It’s clear AOV is a key performance indicator that you can use to measure the success of your online store. Higher AOV means a bigger difference between your order value and your customer acquisition costs, which in turn leads to increased profitability.
Track the AOV in combination with other metrics like traffic, conversion rate, and revenue per visit to get a full picture of your online store performance. Then implement some of the tactics mentioned in this article to make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for and encourage them to add more items to their carts.
Don’t forget to measure the before/after - it’s the only way to know what’s working and further solidify your strategy.
About Pixyle
Pixyle.ai is the world’s most accurate visual AI product discovery platform for fashion ecommerce. We're a mission to transform the fashion industry through intelligent automation. Through the use of computer vision, we help e-commerce companies deliver an intuitive product discovery experience that enables shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for faster and easier than ever before.
Pixyle AI generates e-commerce product data that enables brands, retailers and marketplaces to deliver exceptional product discovery experiences.
