Increase AOV through the onsite experience
First impressions matter. Your website is often your customers' first interaction with your brand, and a thoughtfully designed onsite experience can be the deciding factor for a customer to make a purchase. By optimizing your website to encourage higher or repeat purchases, you can effectively increase your AOV.
In this video, you’ll learn 5 tactics to inspire customers to spend more with every visit.
Recommended strategies for your onsite experience
Let’s dive into how to implement these AOV-boosting tactics for your business.
Promote free shipping
While free shipping is a popular strategy to increase ecommerce AOV, it’s important to consider if it is right for your business. After all, you don’t want to lose the gains from increased AOV due to increased shipping costs.
For example, if you sell items that are heavy, large, or fragile, your shipping costs may be higher and you may find this strategy is too expensive for your business.
On the other hand, you may notice that offering free shipping removes a purchasing barrier and increases conversions.
Tip: Before implementing free shipping, balance your average cost of shipping against your average margin (the profit margin of your company in the long run). Then, introduce free shipping and closely monitor conversion rates. You may find conversion rates stay nearly the same or that the increased AOV makes up for a slight decrease in conversion rate.
Highlight complementary products
Ensure customers can easily discover related products with the following strategies:
Create collections or categories
Use collections or categories on your website to quickly group similar products for customers. A few standard collections include:
- Best sellers
- New arrivals
- Sales
Highlight and display unique groupings prominently on your website to draw customers to items that you intended for use together:
- Website menu
- Home page
- Website forms
Recommend similar products
Another option is to utilize personalized recommendations within product pages. This often looks like a selection of related products highlighted below the primary product titled, “Suggested for you” or “You may also like.”
Note: Depending on your ecommerce platform and theme, you can use various tools that allow you to select related products to display, show recently viewed products, or set static recommendations. We recommend reviewing the tools your ecommerce platform offers to enable more personalized recommendations.
Use organizational tools to optimize search
Additionally, manually organize products within your collections or categories to show directly related products side-by-side, quickly bringing browsers’ attention to both items.
Your ecommerce platform likely has the option to allow customers to search your store. If you don’t already offer this, consider doing so to enable customers to quickly find exactly what they are looking for. These types of website search engines usually pull from product information to select relevant results, including:
- Product name
- Product description
- Tags or attributes
Note: Tags and attributes are particularly useful, for example, if you have a product that is part of your Spring Collection, you can tag it “Spring” and it will show when someone searched that word even if it is not included in the product's name or description. These tags and attributes can also be used to create filtered search options that let customers narrow their search based on certain criteria.
Offer volume-based discounts
Bulk or volume discounts can encourage customers to buy more at once, increasing overall revenue and AOV. When considering volume based or bulk discounts, remember to consider your:
- Costs
- Revenue
- Margin
Tip: Focus on smaller items, as the cost of shipping will increase less dramatically than for larger and heavier items.
Note: It’s important to consider your business and customer. For example, a furniture company that deals directly with individual consumers may find less success with this strategy than a furniture company that also deals in wholesale.
Provide product or service bundling
Bundles can entice customers to add more to their carts by offering extra value. When selecting products for a bundle, consider the following tips:
- Include at least one item that has a high margin: Since discounting cuts into your margin, this will help lessen the impact.
- Include at least one “best-seller” to hook customers: Sometimes, your best-seller will already have a higher than average margin because the demand for it is high, in which case one product can serve both purposes.
Your best-sellers are often ideal hooks and may already have healthy margins, so creating the right mix is key.
Implement in-cart upsells
The shopping cart is your last chance to offer additional products before a customer checks out.
Use these tips to effectively implement in-cart upsells:
- Suggest low-cost items.
- Focus on items that complement what customers already have in their carts.
- Display upsells clearly and unobtrusively.
- Make it easy to add offers with a single click.
You can use a tool like Rebuy or Nosto to quickly and easily implement in-cart upsells and help encourage those last-minute, "why not?" decisions without disrupting checkout.
Capitalize on cart abandonment
Even if customers don't go through with making a purchase while they're on your site, there are still valuable opportunities to increase AOV from these shoppers. With the right strategies, you can recover abandoned orders and encourage larger ones.
Drive revenue with cart abandonment flows
Cart abandonment flows are one of the most powerful revenue-driving flows you have in your arsenal. Not only do they bring customers back to complete their purchases, but you can also use them to increase order size.
Implement these strategies to increase AOV with each abandoned cart:
- Add a personalized product feed to your emails to highlight products your customers are likely to also buy.
- Include upsell messaging to incentivize larger purchases.
Clearly display discount offers so customers know why to buy more.
Segment messaging based on cart value
Different cart sizes mean different opportunities. High-ticket items may not benefit from the same upsell approach as lower-value orders.
Build your flows so that your messaging and offers are tailored precisely to cart value. This will help your communication feel relevant and maximize AOV potential.
Here's how to implement this:
- Add a series of trigger splits to your flow to send different cart values down different paths in your flow.
- Tailor offers, recommended products, and copy to the value of the cart.
Publish strategic sign-up forms
Sign-up forms can capture your customer's attention and support your long-term AOV and revenue goals.
Use signup forms strategically to:
- Reinforce website messages: let customers know about announcements and promotions like free shipping, volume-based discounts, etc.
- Create a sense of urgency: build exclusivity on limited time offers with a countdown timer on a form.
- Collect customer data: use preference data to send targeting product recommendations to increase AOV.