Average order value (AOV): formula and honest ways to raise it

What average order value tells you

It’s the typical size of a checkout. It answers a simple question: when someone buys from you, how much do they usually spend?

That matters because every order carries fixed costs. Packing, payment fees, customer service time and often postage cost roughly the same whether someone buys one £9 candle or four. A higher AOV spreads those costs over more revenue. It also tells you how much you can afford to spend to win a sale. If the average order is £30, paying £25 in ads per order leaves very little.

What it doesn’t tell you: how many people buy, whether they come back, or whether you make a profit. A shop can raise its AOV and still lose money if the extra items are low-margin or heavily discounted.

The AOV formula

Average order value = total order revenue ÷ number of orders

The maths is the easy part. The decisions are in what goes into “revenue”:

• Discounts: use the amount customers actually paid, after coupons.
• Tax: most shops leave VAT or sales tax out, because it isn’t your money.
• Shipping: if you pass postage straight through at cost, leave it out. If you charge more than it costs you, there’s a case for keeping it in. Either way, pick one and stick with it.
• Refunds: decide whether refunded orders come out of both the revenue and the order count.

None of these choices is wrong. Mixing them is. If January includes shipping and February doesn’t, the comparison is meaningless.

Worked example: a WooCommerce candle shop

Say a small shop selling candles and diffusers has this October, with all figures excluding VAT:

• 180 orders
• £5,940 in product revenue after discounts
• £720 charged for shipping
• 6 orders refunded in full, worth £150 in product revenue

AOV without shipping: £5,940 ÷ 180 = £33.00

AOV with shipping: (£5,940 + £720) ÷ 180 = £37.00

AOV without shipping, refunds removed: (£5,940 − £150) ÷ 174 = £33.28

Three honest figures from the same month. The one to use is the one you’ll calculate the same way every month.

Watch out for one-off big orders

Averages are easily pulled about. Suppose one of those 180 orders was a £900 wholesale order from a local gift shop. Take it out and the AOV of the other 179 orders falls to about £28. If you sometimes get large trade orders, look at the median order value as well (the middle order when you line them all up by size). It shows what a typical customer spends without the outliers.

AOV vs conversion rate vs revenue per visitor

These three are linked, and looking at any one of them alone can mislead you.

• Conversion rate is how many visits or visitors turn into orders.
• AOV is how much each order is worth.
• Revenue per visitor combines the two.

Revenue per visitor = total revenue ÷ unique visitors

You can also get it by multiplying orders per visitor by AOV. That’s why it’s the most useful single check on a change: it rewards you for more orders, bigger orders, or both.

Here’s the candle shop before and after adding a free-shipping threshold:

	September	October
Unique visitors	6,000	6,000
Orders per visitor	2.5%	2.3%
Orders	150	138
AOV	£30.00	£36.00
Revenue	£4,500	£4,968
Revenue per visitor	£0.75	£0.83

Fewer people bought, which on its own looks bad. But they spent more, and revenue per visitor went up. Judge the change on that, then check margin, because free shipping isn’t free to you.

It’s also worth splitting AOV by traffic source. Returning newsletter readers often buy bigger baskets than first-time visitors from social media, and that changes how much each channel is really worth.

Honest ways to raise AOV

The aim is to help people buy what they’d genuinely want, not to trick them into spending more.

Bundles that make sense

Group products people already buy together: a candle with a matching refill, a starter set of three scents, a course with its workbook. Price the bundle a little below the separate items so there’s a real saving. Look at your past orders to see which products already appear together.

A free-shipping threshold set from your own numbers

Set the threshold a bit above your current AOV. If most orders sit around £33, a £40 threshold is within reach for many baskets; £75 isn’t. Show it clearly on product pages and in the basket (“Spend £7 more for free delivery”) rather than revealing it at checkout. Then check that the extra spend covers the postage you’re now paying.

Relevant add-ons in the basket

WooCommerce lets you set upsells and cross-sells on each product, which appear on product and basket pages. Keep them relevant and cheap relative to the main item: wick trimmers with candles, not a second candle that costs more than the first.

Quantity and size options

A larger size, a multipack or a small discount for three or more gives people who’d buy more anyway a reason to do it in one order.

What to avoid

• Fake countdown timers and “only 2 left” messages that aren’t true.
• Pre-ticked add-ons. Consumer rules in the UK and EU restrict charging for extras that customers didn’t actively choose.
• Inflated “was” prices to make a bundle look like a bargain.
• Hiding the cheaper single option.

These may lift AOV for a month. They cost you in refunds, complaints and customers who don’t come back, which shows up in customer lifetime value.

Tracking AOV on WordPress

WooCommerce’s own reports give you order totals and counts, which is enough to work out a shop-wide figure. To see AOV by source or campaign, you need analytics that ties each order to where the buyer came from. Analyzine shows revenue and value per conversion inside wp-admin, broken down by source, medium and campaign, so you can see whether the newsletter or the paid campaign brings the bigger baskets.

One last check before you push AOV up: a higher threshold or a pushier basket can raise your cart abandonment rate. Watch both numbers for the first few weeks after any change.

Frequently asked questions