372. How to Increase Your eCommerce Average Order Value

When it comes to growing your eCommerce business you have 3 options. Get more customers, bring back your existing customers more often, or get the ones who are already shopping to spend more while they’re there. 

While all of these levers are important; getting someone who is already in buying mode to add one more thing to their cart, or upgrade what they’re already getting, is the lowest-effort, lowest-cost way to grow your revenue.

Let’s talk about increasing your average order value.

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Cross-Sells: Selling Complementary Products

Cross-sells are a complementary product to what someone is already buying. 

Someone buys a pair of pants, you suggest a top. Someone buys a candle, you suggest the wick trimmer. Someone buys a dog collar, you suggest the matching leash. The goal is to show them something that genuinely goes with what they already picked out, not just throw random products at them and hope something sticks.

Think of this as the experience you have in a fitting room at a boutique. A good sales associate doesn’t hand you the item and disappear. They come back with a few things — “this pairs really well with what you grabbed,” or “we just got this belt in that would look amazing with those jeans.” 

It’s the recommendation a cashier makes to you when you’re checking out or the impulse fixtures you browse while you wait in line. It’s the, do you want fries with that?

They’re not being pushy. They’re being helpful. That’s the energy your store should have.

Cross-Sells at the Product-Level

The product page is your first opportunity to implement cross-sells. If you’re on Shopify, you’ll want at a minimum to get started with Shopify’s Search and Discovery app. This allows you to add complimentary products to the product information section of your product template; think under your add to cart button. 

You set these up manually, meaning you’re telling Shopify which products pair with which. Yes, it’s a project if you have a big catalog, but it’s a one-time setup and then it just works. The second feature is recommended products — that “you might also like” section at the bottom of the page. This one can run automatically based on Shopify’s algorithm, or you can curate it yourself. 

While these are both a great place to start, especially if you don’t want to have to pay for another app, they are passive. They just sit there and you hope your customer takes notice. 

Instead, I prefer a more active cross-sell. One that interrupts the shopping experience and requires the customer to make a decision. Either they opt to take the cross-sell, or they don’t. 

You’ll definitely need an app to create this type of experience, but don’t worry… I’ll add recommendations to the show notes. 

Cross-sells at the product level are generally the best option when you have a wide product range and need to make more intentional matchups between products. 

Choosing the Best Cross-Sell Products

When you’re thinking about what you want to present as a cross-sell at this stage, you want to be careful that you’re not asking too much of the customer and that you’re mimicking how they already shop. 

Price wise, you want to be careful you’re not asking them to double what they were already planning to spend. I try and keep cross-sells at about 15-30% of the price of the original product they were buying. Now this of course won’t always be possible depending on the range of your products, so don’t feel like you can’t do it IF you can’t match that. But just be smart about it. 

For example, with my brick-and-mortar boutique, if someone was buying a pair of $150 jeans, I wasn’t going to recommend another pair jeans at the same price. But, I could recommend a $50 top. If they were buying a $50 top, then I would recommend a $24 necklace. Sure, the necklace is 50% of the price of the jeans, but overall we’re talking relatively low numbers for what I sold. 

Additionally, you want to make sure you’re offering them products that are often already purchased together. Don’t try to change someone’s shopping behavior. 

For example, if you sell jewelry, there is often an instinct to show them a bracelet if they buy a pair of earrings. But if your customer doesn’t already buy matching sets, then this isn’t likely to perform well. 

Instead you might want to offer another pair of earrings. And you have to look at what the data in your store is telling you, see what people already buy together. So maybe your customers like to buy a hoop and a stud so they can be worn together, or maybe they buy multiple drop earrings, or multiple rings they can stack.

Use your data to inform what your cross-sells should be.

Cross-Sells at the Cart Level

If you have a smaller product assortment, and can narrow down the cross-sell items to a handful of best-sellers, or obvious add-ons that work with the majority of what you sell, that’s what a cross-sell at the cart level makes sense. 

And you can do this passively, by showing items in the cart, or more actively by triggering a pop-up when someone hits the start checkout button. 

If the product-page cross-sell is the fitting room, then the cart level cross-sell is making recommendations at the cash wrap. 

What you cross-sell at this stage is likely to be different from what you would cross-sell at the product stage. These have to be a bit more universal vs. super specific to the product. 

In our jewelry example earlier we talked about looking at how your people shop naturally and offering them a second product they are likely to buy. That could also work here, depending on the style of jewelry you sell. If you have one particular style of jewelry that all of your customers love, then you could still do something similar here. 

If however you have a lot of different styles then it’s probably easier to offer them a jewelry cleaner instead. This is universal and doesn’t matter what they bought. 

Ultimately, you want this cross-sell to as much of a no-brainer as possible. They’re so close to checking out you don’t want to take them out of the buying process and make them start second-guessing their decision, or making them think too long and hard about what you’re offering. 

Again, leaning on our brick-and-mortar example, think about what is usually at or on the cash-wrap. In my boutique, I had fashion tape, seamless underwear, that little plastic thing that would turn a regular bra into a racerback bra, and… because it was the mid-2000s… scarves. 

Post-Purchase Cross-Sells After Checkout

Post-purchase cross-sells are one of the highest converting cross-sells because the customer has already decided to buy from you. They’ve already trusted you enough to put in their credit card number and give you money. They also just got a dopamine hit from making a purchase.

While there is a lot of overlap with the checkout cross-sell, you do actually have a little bit more freedom here. Think of this like they’re walking out of the store and saw something super cute they missed before, or it’s the thing they forgot. 

Because they’ve already made the buying decision and you’ve already gotten the sale, you can be a bit more bold with what you offer here. While a no-brainer like the checkout cross-sells we discussed is still your best bet, you don’t have to be quite as strict with the price point here and could make a bit of a higher-priced offer if you want, but it should still feel like an easy yes. 

It could be something complimentary like we’ve been discussing, it could be an upsell, which is technically just a larger version of the same thing, we’ll talk more about that in a sec, it could just be a best seller that everyone loves and for some reason this customer didn’t already buy it, or it could just be another of the same exact thing. 

If you’ve ever seen me on video you know I own A LOT of black t-shirts. If I was buying a tee I loved and the store just offered me more of the same at a slight discount, you know I’d be buying another one. 

Upsells: Selling a Larger Version of What The Customer is Already Buying

While upsell and cross-sell are often used interchangeably, technically they’re not. A true upsell, when you’re talking about physical products, is getting the customer to buy a bigger or better version of what they were already going to buy.

If you sell coffee and you have a 12-ounce bag and a 24-ounce bag, getting someone to go for the 24-ounce is an upsell. If you sell lashes and you offer a single pair or a pack of three, getting them to choose the pack of three — upsell. Same product, more of it. 

Or if you have a newer or updated version of something, pointing them toward that instead is also an upsell. You see this on stores like Amazon a lot, especially with anything technical. You’ll be on the product page and there will be a little note that says there’s a newer version available. 

Where you implement the upsell is going to depend on your product assortment. If you’re a one-product store, you can put these at checkout. Otherwise, I’d put them on the product level. If your products are listed as variants, you don’t necessarily have to do this, but it wouldn’t hurt to try honestly. 

The one downside to upsells is that it could increase the time between purchases, but honestly, that’s not a good enough reason not to use them.

How to Use Strategic Product Bundles in Your eCommerce Store

Bundles are essentially their own form of cross-sells and upsells, they’re just pre-determined. Bundles also have a bit of their own strategic layer which is why we’re talking about them separately. 

At the most basic level, a bundle is a combination of products sold together, sometimes at a slight discount, sometimes not. But there are a few different ways to approach bundling and they serve different goals.

The Forced Bundle or Pre-Pack

This is essentially when there is no option to purchase a product individually and they must be bought in a pack. Think of underwear or socks you buy at a big box store. This makes the most sense for lower-priced products. 

This protects your margins, increases your AOV automatically, and sometimes makes more sense from a product use perspective too. If you sell hair ties or stickers, selling them one at a time might not even be logical. So you just make the multi-pack the only option.

The Inventory Movement Bundle

If you’ve got something sitting in your inventory that isn’t moving, pair it with a best-selling item that does. Price it right and it feels like a deal to the customer. For you, it’s inventory management with an AOV benefit built in. 

Curated and Gift-Ready Bundles

This is where you do the work of putting together a great combination, give it a name, make it feel intentional, and suddenly someone who was going to buy one thing is buying three because you made it easy. You can also just think of these as pre-made bundles. There are a few different ways you can curate these.

Multiple of the Same Product

Similar to the pre-pack, but in this case they can still buy the products individually. For example, if you sell scented candles, you might put together a bundle of all your best selling scents, or all one kind of scent. 

Or you might put together a seasonal bundle. If you release seasonal scents, colors or flavors of your products, you can sell a bundle of all the seasonal releases together for a slight discount. 

It doesn’t even need to be different variants honestly. Again, it could just be a pack of multiples. 

Mix & Match Products

These can be built around a theme, for example a scent or a print. Or you can just create an experience. 

For example, I had an email client who is an artist. She takes her drawings and puts them on products like cards, writing pads, tote bags, tea towels, etc. For Mother’s day, she curates a box, 1 of each of her best selling products with one of her art drawings. A flower she created. 

This is also like when you buy a perfume and you get the matching scented hand lotion, and the travel size perfume. 

Or, again, you can just create an experience. So a bag of coffee with a mug, a pair of socks, and a bookmark. 

Mix and match product bundles are definitely a bit more labor and inventory intensive. Unless it’s going to be a main part of your business model, or your entire business model, I recommend you only focus on them around popular gift-giving holidays. In addition to being a great way to make things easy on your customer, it’s also a great opportunity to build a product launch campaign with the built-in urgency of limited quantities.

Build Your Own Bundles

Build your own bundles is where you put your customers in the driver’s seat. You set the parameters of how many products they need to choose, and they do the rest. This works whether you’re offering multiple of the same product or mix and match bundles. 

The one thing to be careful about here is that while build your own bundles naturally sound like the better option because you’re letting customers choose, the truth is, they can lead to analysis paralysis. 

If you feel inclined to have a build-your-own bundle, I also recommend you have some pre-made bundles. 

How to Implement Bundles on Your eCommerce Store

How you implement your bundles depends on a few factors, the first being are they pre-made or build-your-own. 

They can also live in multiple different places. You can create them as their own separate product, you can put them as a frequently bought together one-click add-to-cart from a product page, you can even offer the bundle option as an upsell. So if someone adds one unit to their cart, you can offer them the 3 pack instead. 

There’s no perfect way to offer a bundle, it just depends on what you’re creating. I recommend you decide on your bundle formation strategy first, and then it will be easier to figure out the right way to present it. 

Implementing Cross-Sells Through Email Marketing

When it comes to increasing your eCommerce average order value, the majority of your efforts are going to be on the website itself; essentially everything we’ve talked about so far. 

But there is one other place you can implement a cross-sell strategy, if it’s a better fit for your tech stack. 

Sending a post-purchase cross-sell in email. 

And I don’t mean sending a cross-sell X number of days after someone bought from you. We’ll talk more about that later in the series in our retention episode. I mean sending an email immediately just a few minutes after the order is placed. 

There are two specific situations where I had to implement it this way, both of them were on older versions of Shopify though before apps could integrate directly into checkout. In this day and age it shouldn’t be an issue, but I wanted to make sure to mention it just in case. Plus, it’s a really easy way to test something out, without adding another app to your store. 

The trick with this implementation is that it needs to be an inexpensive no-brainer product and you want to put a short time limit on the offer. 

At my previous day job it was a private label toy cleaner that we had a really good margin on. With a client of mine who sold razors, it was a holder that would stick to the wall of the shower to hold the razor. 

We set up an automated flow that would send just a few minutes after they completed their purchase with a really good offer on that individual product. I don’t remember the numbers anymore, but it converted really well. 

Now of course, this is technically creating a separate order, so it’s actually going to decrease your AOV, but you’re still making more money so don’t get too hung up on that. 

There was also an app that was super popular back in the day that would let you add featured products to your order confirmation emails and things. I’m not even going to mention it because I just took a peek to see if it was still around and it seems the app has had some major tech issues and some horror stories, so I wouldn’t recommend it. 

Honestly though, if you’re on Shopify, and you want to implement a post-purchase cross-sell, just use an app that embeds it on the thank you page. 

If you’re not on Shopify, and your platform doesn’t have a post-purchase cross-sell option, you can try it the automated email way. 

Putting Together Your Cross-Sell and Upsell Strategy

The most important thing to keep in mind when developing your AOV optimization strategy is that these strategies are a system, not a menu where you pick one and call it done. 

Cross-sells, upsells, and bundles aren’t 3 separate initiatives… They’re tools you mix and match for your unique product assortment and business. 

You can implement all of them at the same time if they’re strategic. A bundle can live as a unique product on your site and also be an upsell. You can have a cross-sell, an upsell, and a post-purchase offer at the same time. You can have year-round evergreen offers and ones that you bring out for specific seasons. 

The wider your product assortment, the more opportunities you have. All these individual strategies we talked about are like ingredients that you mix together to create the perfect dish. 

But at the same time… don’t let that overwhelm you. You don’t have to figure it all out right away. Just start with one and then layer them in over time. 

If I had to pick, I recommend you start with a simple cross-sell. For wide product assortments, trigger it at the product level and for small product assortments trigger it at the check out step.

Shopify Bundle Apps

• Shopify Bundles (free + best for simple bundles that connect to existing listings)
• Bundles by Gazebo (best when you need to include unpublished products in a bundle – ex. blank tees)
• Simple Bundles & Kits (best for build your own that sits on a product page – ex. pick 3 scents)
• Bundle Builder (best for mix & match build your own bundle that lives in a separate experience)