10 Proven Strategies to Increase Average Order Value for eCommerce

In business, there are 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 (increase average order value).

The third is the low-hanging fruit - getting more money from each sale.

Increasing your average order value (AOV) will typically result in higher profit, better return on ad spend, increased cashflow, and more overall revenue, without increasing acquisition cost.

Ultimately, your business will have more potential for growth if you know that the average customer pays you more in each transaction.

In this article, we'll help you scale your AOV. Keep reading for ten proven tips on how to increase average order value for eCommerce stores.

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

How to Increase Average Order Value

There are many actions you can take to increase average order value.

Generally, this means enticing customers to buy more products, or pushing them towards higher-priced products.

At a strategic level, you can test a lot of things, and see which have the biggest impact for your store.

Here are ten tips we recommend for online stores to boost average order value:

1. Set a free shipping threshold
2. Create product bundles
3. Cross-sell and up-sell
4. Show personalized recommendations
5. Use urgency and scarcity
6. Create a loyalty program
7. Sell higher-priced products
8. Offer BNPL
9. A/B testing
10. Launch a mobile app

These are all actionable strategies that can result in a higher average purchase amount.

Let’s dive in now.

1. Set a Free Shipping Threshold

Free shipping is a powerful psychological lever for eCommerce brands.

Today's 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 minimum spend for customers to receive free shipping will mean a lot of customers add extra products to their basket to avoid the shame of paying for shipping.

It doesn’t have to be free shipping, either.

It could be a free gift, or a discount, or any other incentive you think will pique your customers’ interest.

You want to set this threshold a little above your current average order value.

So if your AOV right now is $35, and 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 on shipping.

2. Create Product Bundles

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

You probably 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.

Amazon features a “Frequently bought together” section on every product listing, which recommends complementary products in what is essentially a bundle.

Another option is to offer a bundle where customers can save by purchasing multiple units at a time, as Tessemae's does:

3. Always Cross-Sell and Up-Sell

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

This strategy works. Once someone’s already in the mood to buy, and they’re ready to check out, it becomes much easier to convince them to 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 or more expensive version of whatever it is they’re about to buy (“would you like to make that a large?”)

The trick is to recommend items that logically go well together (such as accessories/add-ons to their main purchase), and don’t push too hard on up-selling to where it becomes intrusive or annoying.

4. 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, giving shoppers ideas for other items to add to their cart and boost their order value.

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

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

5. Use 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 inclination towards 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 urgency and scarcity tactics 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 in front of them.

You don’t have to use it as overwhelmingly as these stores do. But 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.

6. 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 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 with 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’ll 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.

7. 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 $2 ever.

But you have to make sure that your price increase doesn’t have such a negative impact on sales velocity that you make less money as a result.

Another option is introducing new products at a higher price point.

If these products sell, even at a lower volume than your other products, you will still come away with a higher basket value on average.

8. 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 reducing 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.

9. A/B Test Everything

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.

Want to know whether people buy more when you advertise product bundles? Test, and see the results.

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

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 add up to 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.

10. Launch a Mobile App For Your Store

One more powerful way to increase average order value is to launch your own mobile 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 up 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 many more 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.

Want to see how much value you can add? 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 Increase Average Order Value

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

That’s why shopping apps were originally 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 these heavyweights, with MobiLoud.

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

Your apps retain all the same features as your website, with the addition of 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 (launch for low-four figures, then just a few hundred per month then on), 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 a million dollars.

In doing so, you’ll launch 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 real examples of similar branded apps, and help you understand if MobiLoud is the right option to launch your mobile app and grow your business.