How to Increase Average Order Value for eCommerce Stores (Proven Strategies)

In business, there are typically three ways to make more money:

1. Get more customers
2. Get your existing customers to buy more often
3. Get customers to spend more in each order

The third option is the low-hanging fruit; the best option for most online stores to focus on, that will bring the best return with the least amount of time and effort.

Increasing your average order value (AOV) will also boost your profit margins, return on ad spend, cash flow, and baseline revenue. And the best part is, you’re working with the traffic you already have, which is usually simpler than trying to scale your existing traffic.

In this article, we’re going to help you do this, by sharing ten proven strategies that will help you get more out of every order.

Want to check out the benchmarks for average order value and average item sale price across various industries in eCommerce? We broke it all down in this article.

10 Ways to Increase Your Store’s AOV

There are many ways you can go about boosting your AOV.

You can try to get customers to buy more products in each order, or you can push people towards more expensive products.

At a strategic level, there are a lot of things you can test to see if they have an impact. We’ve put together a list of what, in our experience, are the most likely to move the needle.

Let’s dive in now.

Offer Incentives (e.g. Free Shipping) for a Minimum Order Threshold

Free shipping is a powerful psychological lever for eCommerce brands.

Today, shoppers really don’t want to pay for shipping. And it’s not always logical – I’m sure you’ve seen the memes.

Jokes aside, it works. Setting a threshold for customers to spend to receive free shipping will result in a lot of customers adding extra items to their order to meet the threshold.

It doesn’t have to be free shipping, either. It could be a free gift, or a discount, or any other incentive that you think will pique your customers’ interest.

You generally want to set this threshold a little above your current average order value. So if your AOV right now is $35, and you want to get this number up, you might set the minimum spend for free shipping to $40.

Do this, and watch a lot of those $30-$35 customers scramble to spend more money to save the existential pain of having to pay for shipping.

Create Product Bundles

Don’t just sit and hope that your customers will find more things they want to buy. Give them ideas.

You might sell multiple products that go well together – shoes and socks, pots and pans, toothpaste and orange juice (ok maybe not the last one).

Put these products in a bundle, and display these bundles on your site with a convenient “buy now” button to allow the customer to add all the products to their cart at once.

You could offer special pricing for the bundle to make it more attractive, or not. Amazon makes a killing with their “Frequently bought together” section on every product listing, which recommends complementary products in what is essentially a bundle.

Another option is to find products where people might want to buy multiple units, and offer a bundle where they can save by purchasing multiple units at a time, as Tessemae's does here:

Always Cross-Sell and Up-Sell

“Would you like fries with that” is a six-word combo that has probably made billions of dollars for McDonalds over the years.

This strategy works. Once someone’s already in the mood to purchase something, they’ve added it to their cart and they’re ready to check out, it becomes much easier to recommend that they buy some more.

Like McDonalds, you can suggest small add-ons that go well with what they’re already going to buy. Something that makes the customer think, “sure, why not?”

You can also up-sell the customer to a premium/more expensive version of the thing they’re about to buy (fast food restaurants do this too – “would you like to make that a large?”)

The trick is to recommend things that logically go well together (ideally accessories/add-ons to their main purchase), and don’t push too hard on up-selling to where it becomes intrusive or annoying, and risks making customers think twice about their original purchase.

Show Personalized Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are a ubiquitous part of any eCommerce website today, whether they’re similar products, complementary products, or otherwise.

Recommended products give customers more options to compare, letting them shop around to find the perfect buy without leaving your site.

They also act as a cross-sells or up-sells, as we discussed above, giving shoppers ideas for other things to add to their cart and boost their overall order value.

But the key to product recommendations is to use personalization and ensure that what you recommend is relevant to each customer.

Use data you have on your customers, such as order history, browsing history, etc, to show hyper-relevant recommendations that have a higher chance of catching their attention and learning in their cart.

Lean Into Urgency and Scarcity

Urgency and scarcity are classic CRO tactics that are still super-effective.

The reason they work so well is because they play on human nature – our natural instinct to feel FOMO (fear of missing out).

If you want extreme examples of how urgency and scarcity can be used to boost sales, see Shein and Temu, the two new heavyweights of eCommerce, both of whom use both tactics heavily throughout their site and marketing channels.

The words “limited-time sale”, “limited stock available”, “almost sold out” are all plastered across their websites and apps, making shoppers feel like they need to act fast to get the great deals that are in front of them.

You don’t have to make it as overwhelming as these stores do, but using simple limited-time offers, or displaying a notice on products with stocks running low, will convince a lot of customers to act quickly rather than face the terror of missing out.

Create (and Promote) a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs are another classic tool that works for increasing revenue and AOV.

When customers earn points on the money they spend, they’re instantly incentivized to spend more money. It makes recommending cross-sells and add-ons much easier. The product itself might not be as exciting to the customer as the prospect of earning more points.

Many customers scrape, scrounge and hoard points – but don’t even use them. That’s how powerful the psychology of earning points is.

If you don’t offer a loyalty program, you’re basically leaving AOV on the table, particularly considering the many apps that make setting up a loyalty program so easy.

However, don’t just set up a loyalty program and hope customers figure it out, make sure you promote it as well. Let customers know how much they’re set to earn if they buy something, and constantly update them on their point balance, in places like their account page, as well as updates via email and push notifications.

Sell Higher Priced Products

You don’t necessarily need to get people to add additional products to their order to boost AOV. You could just get them to spend more on each item they buy.

There are a couple of ways to do this. First, you could simply increase your prices. If you sold shirts, for example, at $25, you might be able to increase the price to $27 without hurting conversion rate, and make the easiest extra $2 on each sale ever.

The trick is making sure that your price increase doesn’t have such a negative impact on sales volume that you make less money as a result of the change.

Alternatively, you could introduce new products at a higher price point. If these products sell, even at a lower volume than your other products, you may still come away with an increase in AOV.

Offer Buy Now, Pay Later

What about those customers who want to spend more, but get anxiety about the large number coming out of their bank account?

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is becoming a normal part of our lives today. Services like Afterpay, Shop Pay, Klarna, Affirm and more make it easy for customers to pay a smaller amount up front, and easier for brands to convince customers to purchase more in each order.

Some experts suggest that Buy Now Pay Later will be used for 12% of total eCommerce spend in 2025. Globally, more than $350 billion per year is spent using BNPL services.

By cutting down the price barrier for larger purchases, adding BNPL to your checkout flow may be all you need to add a few dollars to your AOV.

A/B Test Everything

There’s a catch-all answer for any “how do I …?” question you have.

Test.

Whether you’re looking to increase conversion rate, average order value, pages per session, or any other metric, the best way to find out what works is to test it.

You want to know whether people buy more when you advertise product bundles? Test, and see what the results are.

You want to know whether people are more likely to spend more if you offer BNPL in checkout? Test it.

You want to know if people add more products to their cart if your add to cart button is blue or black? Test it.

There are so many little things you can test in your store. Some won’t make a difference, but others, though seemingly insignificant, might make a sizable impact.

And as much advice we can give you, the only way to truly know what will deliver results and resonate with your customers is to test, and see what the data tells you.

Launch a Mobile App For Your Store

One more powerful way to increase average order value is to launch your own app.

Modern shopping tendencies are moving more and more in favor of mobile. Mobile commerce makes up 38% of all digital spending in the US, and 57% of all eCommerce sales worldwide.

Having a well-optimized mobile website is the first step, but the mobile web experience still isn’t ideal. In general, people prefer to use apps – 88% of mobile web usage comes on apps, vs mobile websites.

By offering an app, you offer shoppers a better mobile shopping experience, with fewer distractions, and everything set for users to spend more time in your store and buy more products.

Along with 157% higher conversion rates, mobile app users view 4.2x more products per session than on mobile websites.

With users spending a longer time shopping, and less likely to be pulled away by distractions, brands typically see anywhere from 10-20% higher average order values in apps, compared to their websites.

With a number of other incredible benefits to having your own app, like increased brand authority, higher mobile conversion rates, and higher LTV, launching an app might be the one thing on this list that will move the needle the most.

Use our free App Revenue Calculator to get an estimate of how much new revenue your brand can make by launching an app.

How MobiLoud Helps eCommerce Stores Get a Higher AOV

Once upon a time, it would take a six-figure investment or an in-house team of 5-10 specialist developers to launch your own mobile app.

That’s why, originally, shopping apps were gated to only the biggest brands – the Amazons, Nikes, H&Ms of the world.

Today, any brand can launch their own app and compete with those heavyweights above, with a service like MobiLoud.

MobiLoud lets you convert your website into mobile apps, which are fully synced with your website at all times.

Your apps keep all the same features as your website, with the addition of some mobile-specific features, like native menus and push notifications.

The content on your apps update with your website, meaning any changes you make only need to be made once, and automatically reflect across all your platforms.

MobiLoud does all the building, testing, deploying, and ongoing maintenance for you. There’s no need to hire additional staff, or make any changes to your existing workflow.

Your app can be live in less than a month, for a low-four figure investment up front. With the done-for-you service, plus the cost structure (which includes a 60-day money back guarantee), it’s completely risk free, and easily the best way for your brand to branch out into the world of mobile apps.

Boost Your Average Order Value Now

MobiLoud has helped over 2,000 businesses, including many high-revenue eCommerce brands (such as John Varvatos, Jack & Jones, Rainbow Shops, and many more) build their own mobile apps with a low investment and little to no overhead.

Your brand can do the same. You don’t need to be a billion-dollar company to launch an app – all you need is a website that works well on mobile, and we’ll turn it into an app that looks like it cost six-seven figures.

In doing so, you’ll have a great vehicle to increase your average order value and boost profit, revenue, and much more.

If you want to see what’s possible for your brand, get a free demo now and we’ll explain the process, show you an interactive preview of what your app could look like, and help you to be sure that MobiLoud is the right option to launch your mobile app.