Average order value is the average amount a customer spends per order, calculated by dividing total revenue by the number of orders over a given period.
A Simple Number With an Easy Blind Spot
What is average order value trying to isolate is a specific kind of growth: getting more out of each transaction rather than just getting more transactions. A rising AOV often means upsells, bundles, or cross-sells are working, even if the total number of orders stays completely flat that month. This matters because a store chasing more orders and a store chasing bigger orders need different strategies, and AOV is what tells you which one is actually moving.
The blind spot worth knowing about: AOV alone doesn’t distinguish between a genuinely larger basket and an order that includes a return waiting to happen, like a customer buying two sizes of the same item to try on and send one back. A rising AOV paired with a rising return rate isn’t the win it looks like on the surface.
The Formula
The AOV formula is straightforward:
Average Order Value = Total Revenue ÷ Number of Orders
For example, a store that generates 10,000 dollars in revenue from 200 orders in a month has an average order value of 50 dollars. How to calculate AOV for a specific campaign rather than the whole store works the same way, just narrowing the revenue and order count to that campaign’s window, which makes it possible to compare which emails drive bigger baskets rather than just more of them.
Practical Ways to Move It
Common ways to increase average order value include product bundles that make buying two items feel like the natural choice, a free shipping threshold set slightly above the current AOV so customers add one more item to qualify, and cross-sell or upsell emails shown at checkout or during post-purchase follow-up, when the customer is already in a buying mindset rather than needing to be convinced to start over.
What a Reasonable Benchmark Actually Looks Like
Global ecommerce AOV sat around 150 dollars in late 2025, though this figure varies enormously by category:
- Luxury and jewelry brands: often average well over 300 dollars.
- Beauty and personal care: can sit closer to 70 dollars.
This spread makes an external, industry-wide AOV target close to useless for most individual stores, the more useful benchmark is a store’s own AOV over time. On the tactics side:
- Free shipping thresholds set roughly 30 percent above current AOV have been shown to drive AOV increases in the 15 to 25 percent range.
- Product bundling has produced lifts as high as 20 to 35 percent in some implementations.
Related terms:
Adflipr’s analytics dashboard tracks AOV alongside open and click rates, showing whether campaigns are driving bigger orders, not just more opens.
