Ecommerce & CRO
AOV
Average Order Value
AOV, or average order value, is the average amount a customer spends per order — total revenue divided by number of orders over the same period. It is one of the three levers on ecommerce revenue, alongside traffic and conversion rate. Raising AOV through bundling, upsells, or free-shipping thresholds is usually cheaper than buying more traffic.
Why it matters
Of the three levers on ecommerce revenue, AOV is the one most stores neglect. Traffic costs money that rises every year. Conversion rate moves slowly and in small increments. AOV can often be moved in a week, by changing what shoppers are offered rather than how many of them arrive.
The arithmetic is worth doing explicitly. A store doing 1,000 orders a month at £60 makes £60,000. Lift AOV to £66 — a 10% move, achievable through a free-shipping threshold and one relevant cross-sell — and that is £6,000 a month with no additional acquisition spend and no additional traffic.
It also changes what a business can afford to pay for a customer. Higher AOV means a higher viable CAC, which means bidding on keywords that were previously out of reach.
How it works on Shopify
Shopify reports AOV in Analytics, and the number there is a starting point rather than an answer. The useful work is segmentation: AOV by traffic source, by device, by new against returning customer, and by landing page.
The segments diverge sharply and the differences are actionable. Mobile AOV below desktop usually points at a cart or upsell experience that does not work on a small screen. Paid social AOV below organic is normal — that traffic is colder — but the size of the gap tells you whether the campaign is buying customers or buying single cheap orders.
The mechanisms available are free-shipping thresholds set just above current AOV, bundles priced below the sum of their parts, quantity breaks, upsells on the product page and after purchase, and cart-level progress indicators showing how close a shopper is to a threshold.
Post-purchase upsells deserve particular attention: they cannot jeopardise the original order, which is why they convert as well as they do.
Common mistakes
- Reading one number. Blended AOV across all sources and devices hides every fact worth acting on.
- Setting the free-shipping threshold by intuition. It should sit modestly above current AOV. Too high and it is ignored; too low and margin is given away on orders that would have happened anyway.
- Optimising AOV against margin. Selling more of the low-margin item raises AOV and lowers profit. Watch both.
- Irrelevant recommendations. "Frequently bought together" driven by store-wide popularity rather than genuine affinity trains shoppers to ignore the block.
- Discounting to hit a threshold. A bundle discount that exceeds the shipping cost it replaces is a loss dressed as a win.
When you need help
The point worth outside input is when the obvious levers are in place and the number will not move — thresholds set, upsells running, bundles live, AOV flat. That usually means the merchandising logic is wrong rather than missing: recommendations that are popular instead of relevant, or bundles built around what the business wants to shift rather than what shoppers buy together.
The other case is the analysis itself. Segmenting AOV against margin and LTV, rather than in isolation, is what separates a genuine improvement from a number that went up while profit went down.
Related terms
- Conversion rateConversion rate is the share of sessions that end in a purchase — orders divided by sessions. Across ecommerce it typically sits between 1% and 3%, though it varies sharply by traffic source, device, and category. Because it multiplies against all traffic, a move from 1.8% to 2.2% is worth more than most acquisition campaigns.
- UpsellingUpselling is prompting a shopper to buy a higher-value version of what they already intend to buy — a larger size, a premium tier, a longer warranty. It raises AOV without new traffic. Placement matters more than the offer: post-purchase upsells convert well precisely because they cannot jeopardise the original order.
- Cross-sellingCross-selling is recommending complementary products alongside the one a shopper is buying — the case with the phone, the belt with the trousers. Where upselling trades up on the same item, cross-selling adds a second item. Both raise AOV, and both work best when the recommendation is genuinely relevant rather than merely popular.
- GMVGMV, or gross merchandise value, is the total value of goods sold through a store over a period, before deducting discounts, returns, refunds, or fees. It measures the scale of a marketplace or store rather than its profitability, which is why it is quoted often and should be read carefully — net revenue can be far lower.