Here are our hints and tips on how to increase your average order value:
- Understand your orders and buyers
- Review the current market and your price position within it
- Use features within the REC+ software to increase order size
1. Understand your orders and buyers
- Segment your users so you can target which ones to focus on, for example:
- Retail - often place lower value items
- Trade - often place mid-value items
- Major accounts - place large orders that make a large difference
- Home market - what factors are affecting the market generally and how does it affect your buyers
- International - special factors may apply including currency fluctuations, delivery costs and regulations
- Focus on the best AOV metric, known as measures of central tendency i.e. mean, median, mode:
- Mean - general indicator giving the overall average and easy to measure
- Median - the middle value of all orders
- Mode - the most frequently occurring order value and often the best one to use because it strips out very large or very small orders that skew the average
- Analyse orders by channel and set your promotional approach for each, for example:
- Organic - content and upsell/cross-sell improvements
- Ads - consider campaigns for higher value products
- Social - post updates for higher value products
- Email - send campaigns for higher value products
- Referral - run outreach programs to gain backlinks to higher value products
2. Review the current market and your price position within it
- Account for the macro-economic position and how it is changing so you can set realistic and achievable targets:
- Economic up/downturns affecting consumer confidence and spending, including changes in inflation
- Pandemics / government support such as which industries your buyers are in, when furlough support ends and redundancies follow, when restrictions lift on shopping and leisure that switch spend from online to bricks-and-mortar.
- Pricing - monitor your prices against competitors and your own distribution channel. This can help you to increase margins where your products are under-priced and understand what promotions are being run elsewhere which may be causing your own sales to drop off. You can also reduce prices via promotions for end-of-life products. Read about our Price Comparison tool.
- Legislation & regulations that affect your sales by order size, such as EU Import One Stop Shop for orders under €150. Read more about how we handle EU IOSS.
- Currency fluctuations and their effect on prices and purchasing.
- Delivery services and charges are in line with or better than competitors.
3. Use features within the REC+ software to increase order size
- Product pages - review and improve product pages starting with higher value products that are best sellers and most viewed/least purchased, typically as part of a rolling program over a number of months. Areas to improve include having:
- Great images / videos / 3D
- Good descriptive text that fully covers what people need to know to make a buying decision
- Reference within the text to other products that go along with this one or recommendations for other higher value products with benefits from upgrading to them
- Staff recommendations text added in about why this is a great part for the vehicle in your own words
- Most relevant associated products listed - as referenced in the description
- Most relevant alternative products listed - as referenced in the description
- Addon products shown where relevant - can include services and other products that are typically bought with this one or as the next purchase
- Quantity price breaks set up to encourage more than 1 item to be bought
- In-cart deals to encourage buyers to purchase more and display associated products within the cart as well
- Product bundles which have higher order values due to multiple products being sold together - note: does not currently integrate with Unleashed
- Personalised email campaigns sent via Email Manager for higher value products
- Prospect Manager for capturing leads on a dedicated page, for example to sign up new distributors or major clients and track the progress of the lead
- Live Chat consistently available on the site to help buyers make their purchase (you can use any live chat service for this, we tend to promote tawk because it is simple and free to use). Research shows it can improve conversion by up to 20% and average order value by 10%.
- Promoting longer payment terms using payment services which allow you to spread the cost of the purchase either via a credit agreement (such as Paypal Credit) or splitting payments into 3 parts (such as Klarna)
- Advertising on your own site especially putting your special offers and recommendations on category pages which also improves SEO for increased traffic
- Writing regular blog posts or having dedicated pages that assist buyers in understanding:
- Best products relevant to them (based on search terms, application, specific product groups e.g. selling automotive parts for Audi, BMW etc)
- Popular products and bestsellers being purchased
- Latest products
- Upcoming products
Long term traffic generation
This also builds up traffic over a period of time from organic search indexing and these articles can also be promoted via email and social media campaigns. Remember: whatever is posting out via social media should also normally be on your website too. Content can also be repurposed or updated each year for example, Top Sellers In 2021 can become Top Sellers in 2022, 2023 and so on.
- Product launch process which encourages people to signal their interest in advance, place early-bird or pre-orders.
- Wish lists which you review regularly to see what people desire.
- High value abandoned cart email notifications so you can follow these up by email or phone for registered users.
- Reviewing orders in Order Manager every day that have been started but not paid and then following these up.
- Using Google Analytics or in-built reports in Report Manager to understand your data better including:
- Order Information Report
- Report Builder - build management reports across a wide range of metrics
- Top Products Report
- Top Manufacturer/Brand & Category Report
- Order Profitability Report
- Users Making Purchases
- Review top visited products using ad spend and decide if they should be removed from the product feed because they are not profitable enough or less important to promote than other products. A product can be removed from the google feed on the Edit Product screen.
4. Run Product / Pricing Experiments
Select a range of products to run experiments on and measure how successful they are then replicate the changes across a wider of products.
For example:
- Including addons on a product page with a choice from a low price, medium price and high price addon.
- Adding new product bundles with products popularly bought together with a small discount
- Running in-cart deals which trigger at your desired AOV
When you make changes, go back after a period of time and check conversion rate plus average order value.
Other Features Under Consideration In The Development Schedule
- Refer-a-friend (now available)
- 'Like' button on product pages to gauge interest
- 'Price drop' alerts
Do you have other ideas? Please let us know!