Average Order Value: How to Calculate It and 12 Ways to Raise It

If you run a store, you already track revenue and order count. Average order value (AOV) just divides one by the other, but the number it produces changes how you think about growth. Instead of asking "how do I get more customers," you start asking "how do I get more out of the customers I already have" — a cheaper question, and one with a longer list of answers.

What average order value means

The formula is simple:

AOV = Total revenue ÷ Number of orders

If your store did $40,000 in revenue last month across 800 orders, your AOV was $50. That's it — no adjustment for returns, discounts applied after the fact, or customer lifetime value. Those are related metrics, but AOV is deliberately narrow: one order, one number.

Track it over a consistent window — weekly or monthly, not all-time — so seasonal swings and one-off promotions don't flatten into a figure that doesn't mean anything day to day. A holiday-week AOV and a slow-February AOV are different numbers for a reason, and averaging them together erases the reason.

Most store owners track AOV at the storefront level only, as one number for the whole business. That hides a lot. A more useful view breaks it down by product or category, so you can see which products pull the average up and which drag it down. If you also track order value next to ratings for each product, a product that's both underselling and under-rated tells you something very different from a product that's simply cheap — one is a pricing or merchandising question, the other is a product-quality question, and they need different fixes.

Why a small AOV increase matters more than it looks like

A $10 increase in AOV across 10,000 orders a year is $100,000 in additional revenue, with no additional ad spend and usually no additional fulfillment cost beyond the extra item itself. Compare that to the cost of acquiring enough new customers to generate the same $100,000 at your current AOV — for most stores, raising AOV is the cheaper lever, and it's one you control directly through merchandising and checkout design rather than through the ad market.

It also compounds with everything else you're doing. A better conversion rate and a higher AOV multiply together; improving both at once moves revenue faster than optimizing either one alone.

12 ways to raise average order value

1. Set a free-shipping threshold just above your current AOV

If your AOV is $48, set free shipping at $60, not $100. Set the bar too far above where customers naturally land and most won't bother reaching for it; set it just above and a meaningful share of carts will grow to clear it. Show the threshold and a running total in the cart ("Add $12 more for free shipping") rather than burying it in a banner.

2. Bundle complementary products

Pair a product with the accessory or consumable that goes with it — a phone case with a screen protector, a coffee grinder with a bag of beans — and price the bundle slightly below buying both separately. Bundling works best when the second item is one the customer would have had to think about buying separately anyway; you're saving them a decision, not just offering a discount.

3. Use quantity discounts on consumables

"Buy 2, save 10%" or "Buy 3, save 15%" works well on anything a customer reorders — skincare, supplements, pet food, cleaning supplies. It raises the order size now and reduces how often they shop around before their next reorder.

4. Add cross-sells at the product page and cart

"Frequently bought together" and "customers also bought" sections work because they're specific to the item already in the cart, not a generic "you might also like" carousel. Keep the suggestions genuinely related — a phone case suggested under a phone, not a randomly merchandised clearance item.

5. Add a one-click upsell at checkout

A single, relevant upsell shown right before or right after the order is placed — a larger size, a protection plan, a faster shipping upgrade — adds revenue to an order that's already committed to buying. Keep it to one offer; a wall of upsell options at the moment someone is trying to finish checking out usually hurts conversion more than it helps AOV.

6. Build starter kits for new customers

A "starter kit" or "essentials bundle" aimed at first-time buyers gives people who don't yet know your catalog a reason to buy more than the one item that brought them to your site. It also sets a higher first-order baseline that later orders tend to anchor against.

7. Offer a gift or sample above a spend threshold

"Free gift with orders over $75" pulls carts up toward the threshold the same way a free-shipping bar does, but it works even for stores where shipping is already free, since the incentive is a product instead of a shipping cost.

8. Use tiered, progress-bar style incentives

Rather than one threshold, stack two or three: free shipping at $50, a sample at $75, 10% off at $100. A visible progress bar in the cart gives customers a reason to keep adding instead of stopping at the first reward.

9. Bundle slower-moving inventory with best-sellers

Pairing a best-seller with a slower-moving product at a bundled price moves inventory you'd otherwise discount later anyway, while raising the order size on your most popular item. This only works if the pairing makes sense to the customer — don't bundle items with nothing in common just because one is overstocked.

10. Personalize recommendations by purchase history

Returning customers respond better to recommendations based on what they've already bought than to generic bestseller lists. A customer who bought a specific running shoe is a better audience for matching socks or insoles than for an unrelated item from your homepage.

11. Offer a loyalty tier tied to order size, not just visit count

Loyalty programs that reward total spend or order size — rather than just signing up or leaving a rating — give customers a reason to add one more item to reach the next tier. Keep the mechanics simple: a points-per-dollar system is easier to act on at checkout than a complicated multi-step reward ladder.

12. Send a post-purchase upsell before the order ships

If your fulfillment process allows a short window between order placed and order packed, a "add this to your order before it ships" email or SMS can capture an add-on without making the customer start a new checkout from scratch. It works best on items genuinely related to what they already bought, sent within hours, not days.

Where to start

Not every tactic belongs at the top of your list. A free-shipping threshold and a checkout upsell are usually the fastest to set up and the easiest to measure, since most ecommerce platforms and apps support them out of the box. Bundling and starter kits take more product and merchandising work but tend to raise AOV by more once they're live, because they change what's in the cart rather than just nudging the total at the last step.

Run one or two at a time and watch AOV over a consistent window before adding the next. Stacking five new incentives at once makes it impossible to tell which one actually moved the number.

The honest limit of AOV tactics: reviews affect whether people buy at all

Every tactic above assumes the customer is already in your cart or on your product page, deciding how much to spend. None of it helps if they never get that far because the product page itself didn't convince them to buy in the first place — and the review count and rating sitting next to the price is one of the most consistently studied factors in that decision.

Research from Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center, which has studied how online reviews influence shopping behavior, has repeatedly found that products with more reviews and higher average ratings convert at meaningfully higher rates than comparable products with few or no reviews — and that the effect tends to grow as price increases, since a shopper weighing a bigger purchase leans more heavily on social proof before committing. That's a qualitative pattern worth planning around, not a single number to chase.

This matters for AOV specifically because of where review strength shows up: at the product level, not the storefront level. A store can have a strong overall rating while a handful of specific products — often newer SKUs, or ones added without much review history yet — sit with few or no reviews. Those are exactly the products least likely to get added to a bundle, upgraded to a bigger size, or picked as the second item in a "frequently bought together" pairing, because a hesitant shopper won't add risk to a cart they're still deciding whether to complete.

The fix isn't asking only your happiest customers for a review, or offering anything in exchange for one — that produces a review profile that looks better than it is and erodes trust the moment a shopper notices the pattern. The fix is making sure every buyer gets asked, consistently, on every order, so review coverage builds evenly across your catalog instead of concentrating on whichever products happen to attract vocal customers.

Put order value and review health in one view

Most stores check AOV in their ecommerce platform and check reviews in a completely separate dashboard, if they check review data at all beyond the storefront widget. Treating them as unrelated numbers means a product that's quietly under-reviewed and under-converting doesn't get flagged until the sales report already shows it. For a deeper look at reading product-level sales and review data together, see our guide to product performance analysis.

Tailwind's Orders product connects to Shopify or WooCommerce, imports your orders and products, and ties each review to the specific order and product that generated it — so you can see AOV, review volume, and rating side by side at the product level instead of guessing which products need a merchandising fix versus a review-coverage fix. It also sends a review request to every buyer automatically after delivery, the same way for every order, so review coverage grows across your whole catalog rather than just your bestsellers.

Each tool on Tailwind is $5 a month, or get everything — including Orders — on the Full plan for $50 a month. The first month is free, no credit card required, and there's no contract.