AOV masterclass

So if a store takes $60,000 from 1,000 orders, its AOV is $60. It's easy to plug your own numbers into this. Use a time frame long enough to give you enough data to see where your average really sits.

That's no new traffic and no extra ad spend, and it doesn't increase your costs. There might be a small fee if you use an app to help lift AOV, but the return on investment is massive. Even incremental gains are huge here: a 10% AOV lift in the same example is worth around $72,000 a year. That's why it's vital to pay attention to AOV, and why even small increases have a big effect on a brand.

Shopify admin → Analytics → Reports → Average order value

Compare like with like

The best way to track AOV is a comparison chart. Look at your AOV in February this year and compare it with February last year. That's the clearest way to see whether you're getting a lift.

Be careful which months you compare. Don't put February against November, because November is Black Friday, and AOV is likely to be higher then than in other months. Stick to the same month and compare it with the year before, and your data set will be accurate.

Use a long enough window

You can also compare quarterly, every six months or yearly. Just be aware the number will be weighted by things like sale periods, holidays and discount periods. Daily or weekly AOV is usually too little data to be useful. It can help if you're running a big sale and want to see whether it's dragging AOV down, but don't use it as general guidance for your brand.

Skip the spikes

Treat Black Friday Cyber Monday as its own calendar period. If you want to know how a normal period compares with BFCM, look at the BFCM period separately and compare it with a non-BFCM period to see how your different campaigns are performing. Shopify Analytics lets you filter down to the BFCM period, which makes this easy to track.

Use the median

Use the median value, not the average. Say customers normally spend around $50, and then one day a customer places a $10,000 order. That one order pulls the average a long way out. The median shows what a normal customer spends.

Payment fees are probably a little higher, but that's a fraction of a percent, or around 1%, depending on your terms. If you sell very large items your packing cost might go up, but you've probably priced that in already. So when you lift AOV from $60 to $75, you keep almost all of that $15 as profit. It's one of the most effective ways to grow revenue because it costs you very little.

This is why bigger brands win. When you spend less to acquire a bigger order, you can reinvest far more in ads and remarketing, because you're capturing larger orders at a much lower cost.

1. A free shipping threshold that's missing, too low or too high

A free shipping threshold means that once a customer's order reaches a set amount, they don't pay for shipping. Where most brands go wrong is setting it in the wrong place. If free shipping kicks in at $40 but most people spend $60, you're not pushing anyone to spend more. Free shipping $20 under your AOV is too generous: everyone gets it, so it doesn't encourage a bigger basket. The opposite problem is a $60 AOV with a $150 threshold, which is far too high.

A good starting point is a threshold around 20% above your AOV. With a $60 AOV, that puts the free shipping bar at around $70 to $75. Be mindful of what free shipping costs you, too, and factor that into the amount you set. Strategy 1 covers how to work it out.

2. Discounts that take money off without adding items

This is when a brand automatically discounts an item in the cart: add a black t-shirt and you get a flat 20% off for no reason. It's a terrible strategy. The customer wasn't expecting it and added the item anyway, so the discount buys nothing.

Use a quantity discount instead. The customer adds the item, then gets a discount if they increase the quantity: 10% off for two, 20% off for three. It's a simple, common tactic and one of the key AOV winners, especially in apparel and some cosmetics brands. If you have a product people buy again and again, we highly recommend it.

3. Nothing easy to add to the order

On the product page, can you upsell the customer into something else? Say you sell vitamins and a customer adds vitamin D to their basket. Is there a magnesium, or something else that pairs with it, that you could offer as a bundle? A runner adding running shoes could be offered socks or a water bottle. Look at what customers are already adding, think about what pairs naturally with it on the product page, either from the same collection or a cleverly paired item, and make it easy to add.

4. Add-ons that don't fit or cost too much

Don't try to upsell a customer who has added a $30 product into a $90 one. It's unlikely to happen, the customer knows they're being upsold, and you create friction and annoy them. Think about natural pairings.

5. Bundles that don't actually save anything

If a bundle costs the same as buying the items separately, customers will notice. They know how a store works and will probably try adding the products separately to compare. A bundle discount that doesn't actually save anything deceives the customer. If you run bundles, make sure they save the customer money.

6. Emails that send everyone the same product

There are some really big brands guilty of this one. If someone has just bought your cleanser, you don't need to market more cleansers to them, or more about the one they've bought. Market products that pair with it. If you sold someone a black t-shirt, show them a white t-shirt or a hoodie. Personalise your email flows on each customer's first, previous and historic orders.

1. 1.Start from your typical order. Look at the last 3 to 6 months of your most recent data and find the order a normal customer places. Use the median from that window rather than the average. In this example, it's $60.
2. 2.Add one popular product. Look at your most popular add-on, or one of the cheaper products in your range that's easy to add to the basket. Say it's around $15. That puts the free shipping threshold at $75.
3. 3.Check it pays for itself. Divide your shipping cost by your margin to see how much more customers need to spend to cover it.

The ideal gap to free shipping is one product, not three, and making it one of your cheaper products makes it much easier for customers to upsell themselves. If a customer realises they only need to add one more $15 product to get free shipping, when they'd pay $5 or $6 for shipping anyway, it's almost a no-brainer. There should be no friction at all: adding the item should be the obvious choice.

Free shipping isn't free

Free shipping still costs you money, so make sure there's enough margin in the products, or in the level you set, for the extra spend to cover it. Say shipping costs you $8 and your margin is around 50%, so you keep 50 cents of every extra dollar a customer spends. To cover the $8, the customer needs to spend $16 more. That takes a $60 order to about $76, so a threshold of about $75 roughly pays for itself.

Once that cost is covered, anything else the customer adds is profit for you, even though they're still getting free shipping. Look at your margins and your AOV and work out what's reasonable for your brand to offer.

The catch: customers who already spend over the threshold

Customers who usually spend over $75 and pay for shipping now get free shipping on an order they were going to place anyway. The goal is to lift enough typical customers over the threshold to more than cover that cost, which is why you start from what a typical customer spends.

Keep an eye on the data. If, say, 10% of customers always spend over $75, and you can't bring in enough extra customers to cover what free shipping now costs you on their orders, you need to adjust. That usually means raising the threshold a little, so it's a bit further out.

Heavy or bulky products

Brands with a very high shipping rate are the exception. In furniture, garden or anything bulky, shipping might be $20 to $30. At a 50% margin, a $20 shipping cost needs a customer to spend $40 more just to cover it, and customers won't usually nearly double their basket for free shipping.

If that's you, offer something else instead of free shipping:

• Faster shipping at the same price. You still charge for shipping, you just get the order to them quicker.
• Discounted shipping. It can scale with basket size, from $5 off to $10 off, right up to free.

Don't assume a high shipping cost means this strategy won't work for you. Adjust it to where your shipping costs sit.

Grüns has a progress bar at the top of the cart that fills as you add items. Reach the goal and the bar tells you you've unlocked free shipping, so the reward feels earned.

A time-based discount is auto-applied too, which is great, because customers hate looking for discount codes. Hunting for one usually takes them off your site and onto promo code websites. You want to keep the customer on the page, in the cart, ready to buy, so show that everything has been auto-applied.

They also push the next upsell straight away. A "Buy 2, save $5" tag on the item gives the customer a reason to increase the quantity as soon as one goal is reached.

Grüns defaults the cart to a subscription purchase, which is a good way to move customers into a subscription. Not everyone reads the fine print, though, and it can annoy some customers, so be careful and pay attention to customer feedback. Their free shipping threshold for a one-time purchase is $100, but a subscribe and save order ships free. So they either ask the customer to hit a spend amount, or to start a subscription and hope it renews enough times to cover the shipping cost. Grüns will have a lot of data on how long subscribers stay and how often they renew. Before you copy this, analyse your own data to make sure customers aren't starting a subscription and cancelling immediately.

Cheap to you, valuable to them

Pick a free gift that costs you only a few dollars but feels valuable to the customer. Minis, samples and accessories work well. If you sell apparel, you can throw in socks or underwear. A lower-cost product doesn't cost you much margin, but to the customer it's a big value add, and everyone loves free product. Choose your gift carefully and the AOV lift will more than cover its cost.

Gift something they haven't tried

Only a few brands do this, because you need a lot of data to do it well: automatically gift something the customer hasn't tried. If they've never bought your socks or a belt, or some other accessory that goes with what they usually buy, offer that as the gift. Intelligent gifting of lower-priced, relevant products works really well.

Show both goals in the cart

Show both goals in the cart so customers can see exactly how close they are to each. Gamify it a little: make the progress bar fill up as they spend more.

The Body Shop has two goals on one progress bar in the cart. Free shipping comes first, then a free mini body butter, which barely costs them anything to make and provide. That's the stacked goal in action.

They also let you choose the gift. Choosing makes it feel personal, because the customer is picking what they want to receive, and that makes the experience much better. If you only offer one specific gift, some customers will assume you're just trying to get rid of it. Offering a range lets them choose.

Because the gifts are sample or travel sizes of their products, they also set up a future purchase. The customer gets the sample free today, and next time they might buy the full size. Depending on your range, you can be really smart about what you gift, because it can act as a future upsell.

Finally, they show the value clearly crossed out. The customer sees a $12 price, and gets $12 of value completely free, while for the brand it's a low-cost product. Grüns does the same with the big percentage saving it shows in the cart. It's always about building as much perceived value as possible, so customers feel they're getting as much as possible for free.

Build bundles from your order data

Don't guess your bundles. Look at your orders from the past few months and find the products that often show up together. That tells you exactly what people want to buy together, and all you need to do is make it cheaper to buy them as a bundle.

If most of your customers already buy that combination, don't throw a discount at it. If 15% or 20% of orders contain the same two or three items, consider adding them as a bundle discount, then track what share of orders start including the bundle. Make sure there's an uplift, and that it covers the cost of discounting the 15% who were already buying it together. That's how you make a bundle profitable.

Bundles work especially well in beauty, cosmetics and skincare, where brands sell a complete routine. A hair care brand, for example, can sell a shampoo, conditioner and treatment together rather than one product on its own. Always show the price of buying the items separately next to the bundle price, so the customer knows exactly how much they're saving.

Multi-buys for products people use up

Offering around three options usually works, although it depends on your brand. Sometimes buying two is the only option that makes sense. A vitamin brand could offer three or even more. Don't go too far, or it gets ridiculous.

A clever way to set the options, and what most brands do, is to match them to how fast people use the product. If a product lasts a month, a three-pack lasts three months. That's a much easier sell, because the customer is already thinking ahead and doesn't want to run out, and having to reorder every single month can be a nightmare. It also helps move customers into subscriptions, with automatic replenishment and more product per order.

Sult defaults you to the three-pack. Switch to a single pack and you can see you're not getting as much value as the three-pack, which they mark as most popular and show the saving on: £18.99 on three packs, against £8.99 on one. The six-pack, labelled best value, saves £33.99. The savings are shown in pounds rather than as a percentage, which communicates really well that buying more is better value.

They then upsell you further with different flavours. You can build a bundle of different products that ties into the pack discount, and the amount you save goes up as you add more.

Product quantity discounts tend to work really well for vitamin companies. On BetterVits, the price changes as you buy more: one bottle is $35, two are $32.50 each, and at three bottles they're $30 each. Subscribe and save is preselected, at up to 33% off, and the price updates as you switch between options, so you're incentivised to subscribe.

When you select three bottles, the options collapse, so you're locked in on three. Psychologically that's clever: you're not clicking back and forth comparing one, two and three bottles. You just add it to the cart. Their cart upsells are good too, suggesting what pairs with what you've added, with a discount.

The one thing we'd change is the free shipping on all orders, from the first bottle, for the reasons in strategy 1. They may already have thought about a threshold.

1. The product page

Add a "Goes well with" section. This works really well for apparel brands: if someone is buying a t-shirt, pair it with jeans, a hoodie or joggers. It's an easy way to pair in a product the customer will like, especially if you sell sets. Place it right under the Add to Cart button so it's obvious and frictionless. Don't send them to another product page. Let them select it and add everything to the cart. They can visit the product page from the cart later.

2. The cart

Offer small, inexpensive add-ons right before checkout, when intent is highest. These are things people grab without thinking, like the chocolate bars and chewing gum at a supermarket checkout. Keep them small, frictionless and cheap, and put them at the moment the customer is about to check out.

3. After purchase

This is a newer one we're seeing brands use, and one of the best levers for increasing AOV. Once the customer has paid, show a one-click offer on the thank you page so they can add something straight to their order. You've already converted the customer and captured the order, so it can't cost you the sale. A customer who has just bought from you is at the highest-intent point of their journey with you, and is often thinking about what else they could buy. Why not offer them something they might already be considering?

What to offer

Don't blindly offer your best sellers. Look back at your order data and ask what people already add alongside the product this customer has checked out with. That tells you exactly what to recommend. Each month, replace the add-ons nobody takes.

Keep the add-on well below the price of the main product. If a customer is buying a $100 product, don't try to upsell them into another $100 product. With a basket of around $100, keep the add-on at $10 to $30 at most, and you'll massively increase the chance it converts.

Grüns has probably perfected the cart upsell.

• A reason, not just a product. The headline gives the customer a reason to buy. Say the customer is a parent buying kids' gummies. Grüns has likely done the customer analysis to know a parent is buying for their child, so the pitch is: you can take this too, add one for yourself and make it a habit you share. If you're buying one for your kid anyway and there's a product that fits you, you might as well try it.
• One click, right in the cart. There's no friction. The customer doesn't need to leave the cart or visit the product page. Everything they need is already there.
• Trust at checkout. Under the checkout button, they take away the risk: you can pause or cancel anytime, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee, and they show reviews as social proof.

When to break the price rule

Grüns actually breaks the rule about upselling add-ons that cost too much. The cart is $24.99 and the upsell is $29.99, more than the cart itself. It works because it isn't really an add-on. It's another product for someone else in the house: the parent buying for their child and then upselling themselves into the brand. With a natural pairing like that, you can step outside the rule.

That's why it's important to understand these rules, so you know when you can break them. Treat these strategies as guidelines and adapt them to your brand. You don't have to copy one brand to a tee, and once you understand a strategy clearly you'll know exactly when to break it.

Spend bonus

A one-time spend bonus: spend $100 or more in a single order and get a $10 bonus in store credit, usually on top of what you already give the customer. Because it's paid as credit on their next order, it also brings them back. If you run points, it works exactly the same way. Say you give 100 points for spending $100: boost that by 10 or 20 points. Tie it to your reward rate so you're not giving back too much value, while still making it worth it for the customer to build a bigger basket.

Bigger orders earn more

Double points on orders over $100 is one of the best ways to encourage bigger baskets through your loyalty program, because it's essentially unlimited. You can do it with points or with store credit.

The difference between a spend bonus and double points is the cap. A spend bonus is a one-time thing: once the customer hits $100, they know they've maxed out the value they can get back, and they stop adding to the basket. Double points or double store credit on orders over a set amount is unlimited. Whether they spend $200, $500 or $1,000, they get value back the whole way up.

If you already give double points to your VIP tiers or top-tier customers, be careful stacking this. A customer already earning 15% or 20% back on their purchases could end up with almost 30% or 40% back if you double it. Lock it down, perhaps with a smaller boost for your higher VIP tiers, who already know they're getting a lot back. It works really well, depending on your margin, so make sure the margin is there to support it.

Stamp card with a minimum

Stamp cards are fun, and you can run them on subscriptions or one-time purchases. On subscriptions they're usually called subscription milestones. The customer meets a criterion on each order and earns a stamp, like the classic coffee shop card: buy five coffees and get one free.

In our example, orders over $60 earn a stamp, and five stamps earn $20 in credit. You can set the minimum slightly above your AOV, and once the customer has collected enough stamps they get a bonus in their account. You can also limit a stamp card to a collection you want to grow, or to a specific product, or tie it to subscriptions: three subscription renewals, or renewals over a set amount. It's very modular, and it's one of the best strategies for encouraging bigger baskets and subscription renewals.

Set a stamp card's minimum around your typical order value, and don't set it too high. For one-time bonuses with a big kickback, it's fine to set the threshold quite high, because the customer is rewarded more. A stamp card is more about purchase frequency. You can add 5% to 10% on top of your AOV if you want to, but the main aim is repeat purchases. You can remarket the card to the customer and show their progress, so they know how close they are to the reward and come back to buy. It works for coffee shops every single time: people go back to the shop where they're about to earn a reward. Your ecommerce store can do the same. It's simple and frictionless, and everyone wins.

Line your goals up as steps, with free shipping at $75 and the spend bonus at $100. Mage powers all of this: stamp cards, subscription renewals, points, store credit and the rest of the loyalty and retention stack.

MiaDonna, a Mage customer, shows a store credit bonus right on the product page. For a limited time they're running double rewards on tennis bracelets.

• The reward is visible before they buy. The store credit you'll earn is shown in dollars, right under the price, instead of being buried in an account page. It's reinforced in the cart too, which shows how much store credit the order will earn.
• A boosted rate with a deadline. The credit is usually $70, but it goes up to $107.60 until 20 October, which gives people a reason to buy now.

They also run a bonus campaign that encourages purchases from a specific collection. And the store credit isn't given immediately. The customer doesn't get the value back on this order: once they've placed it, the credit lands, and they have a reason to come back and use it on another purchase. So it boosts basket size with bonus campaigns on specific products and encourages repeat purchases at the same time.

Complete the set

If a customer has bought a product that pairs well with another, sell the other one to them as part of a set. Upsell "complete the set" and suggest that product in your email marketing. Don't send them more about the product they've already bought.

Finish the bundle

If someone bought one piece of a bundle, show them the rest of it at the bundle price.

Time it right

Send it once the customer has actually used your product. Don't start a complete-the-set email before they've received their order. Work out your usual fulfilment window. If customers typically receive their order 5 or 6 days after buying, send the complete-the-set email around day 10.

Use the data you already have

A lot of brands don't use the data they have. With a loyalty and retention program, upsells and order data, you're collecting a lot of information about how people shop on your store: SMS and email, preferences, buying habits, and how much store credit or how many points each customer has. Use it. Remind customers of their credit balance, your free shipping threshold and your free gift threshold. For example: "You've got $20 in store credit waiting. All orders over $75 ship free, and you get a free gift over $100." Then add products the customer might like.

To see if it's working, compare the AOV of orders from these emails with your store average.

Inbox1 message

Represent

Launch day

Owners Club FW26: available nowRepresent Fall Winter 26' Owners Club capsule collection is available now. Weathered Black. Deep Purple. Evergreen.

R

RepresentLaunch day

To: you@customer.com

Represent is really good at selling sets. Their product launch emails pair related products next to each other: each sweatshirt with its matching sweatpants, and the same for every colour, plus a cap, so you can build a full outfit. Then their imagery shows how the products look together.

That's an A-tier way to display products. You show how to complete the set, you show different colours of the same set, and you go a step further by showing how the products look when they're worn together.

Apply the same idea using your customer data. If a customer buys the washed black sweatshirt, show them the washed black sweatpants and the alternate colour too. You could lay four products out in a 2x2 grid, with the lookbook image for those products beneath it, so they can see how it will look.

Wishlist in the cart

Surfacing the wishlist directly in the cart is a genius idea, and too few brands do it. At the highest-intent moment, when the customer goes to the cart to check out, you show them all their wishlisted products. You're not upselling them, so there's no risk of recommending something expensive and annoying them. They've already saved the product, and you're simply reminding them it's there. When a customer saves a product, they're telling you they want it, and the cart is where to show it to them again. It can lift AOV a lot.

Recently viewed

Most people click through a few products before they buy one. Bring those back into view so the customer doesn't forget what they've seen. It also persists between visits: if a customer visits today and comes back next week, you show them everything they've been viewing so they can click straight to the product page or add it to the cart. At Mage, this lives inside the customer account.

Popular this week

Use your data to show what's popular: what other customers have ordered in the last 24 hours or the last 7 days. It tracks behaviour, and it doubles as social proof, because people follow trends. If they see lots of people buying a product, there's a good chance they'll want it too. It can work much better than a generic "You may also like", because it feels community-based rather than generic.

Oner Active shows your wishlist right next to the recommended products in the cart, so your saved items are one tap away from being added.

If it were up to us, we'd show the wishlist first, or stack the two. Better still, make it dynamic: if the customer has more than a set number of products in their wishlist, show the wishlist tab automatically, and otherwise show the recommendations. That's using data to change the customer journey dynamically, and everyone should be doing it. It's an underused strategy, and Oner Active has done a great job putting it in their cart alongside everything else they do there.

On most stores, clicking the account icon takes the customer off site to a generic Shopify page, hosted by Shopify, usually unbranded, and not a great experience.

On YouSwim, clicking the account icon on a product page opens an account sidebar instead. It shows your wishlist, where you can pick a variant and add straight to the cart, and a recently viewed list that fills as you browse, so you can jump straight back to a product. It also shows your store credit balance, a refer-a-friend link and an advert, and lets you track your orders and manage your profile, all in one view.

This ties back to conversion and upsell, because it keeps the customer on the product page. When they're ready to check out and want to look at their recently viewed or wishlist, they don't have to leave the page to do it, so intent stays high. When they add to cart, it ties in with everything else: the free shipping, the discount and the cart goals, to create the best possible customer journey.

1. 1.Change one thing at a time. Roll out in phases. Start with your free shipping threshold, make sure it's profitable and works with your margin, then introduce things like the free gift.
2. 2.Run it for 2 to 4 weeks. Leave 2 to 4 weeks between each change. Two weeks is generally enough, and four is the safer side. What you generally don't want to do is take something away too fast.
3. 3.Watch AOV and conversion rate together. If AOV goes up but far fewer people buy, it hasn't had a positive impact, and you could still be losing money. Track both: make sure purchases hold up and AOV goes up. You don't want to lift AOV and see a dip in the number of orders you process each month.

Very large brands can also A/B split test, running a change against a subset of customers rather than rolling it out to everyone from the start. That gives you data without upsetting too many people if you need to take it away or change it.

Every business has ups and downs. When you look at the data, be aware of what's an up period and what's a down period, and whether you can accurately attribute a change to the strategy you rolled out, whether that's free shipping, gifts or rewards.

The numbers always have to make sense. Shopify shows all of this in its Analytics section, and most apps you use for these strategies, whether that's Mage or an upsell app, have their own analytics or reporting. You can also export the data out of Shopify and use AI to analyse it if the charts aren't telling you enough.

1. 1.Free shipping threshold.
2. 2.Free gift goal.
3. 3.Bundles and multi-buys.
4. 4.Upsells in 3 places: the product page, the cart and after purchase.
5. 5.Loyalty rewards for bigger orders. Once a customer spends over a set amount, boost their reward rate.
6. 6.Emails that sell the next item. Personalise your emails on each customer's buying behaviour.
7. 7.Show people what they already want. Surface their wishlist in their account and in the cart, at the highest-intent point before checkout.

You don't need to put all seven in place at once, or even use all of them. Pick what fits your brand best, and start with free shipping and bundles, because they're the quickest to set up.

For the emails that go with these strategies, the loyalty email templates cover the full retention email strategy, with templates.