It’s an easy enough conclusion to reach: if you want to sell more from your online store in a single order, isn’t the answer just to drop your prices? Or maybe you could keep your product prices the same, but offer free delivery above a certain threshold?
There’s nothing exactly “wrong” with these strategies, and to a certain extent, it’s true that free delivery for orders over, for example, £20 or £30, can help. But we’re presuming here that you ideally want your customers to spend some way north of that minimum amount.
In any case, if you really wish to turbo-charge your online shop’s average order value (AOV), you can’t depend on just lowering prices. After all, that’s something the obvious ecommerce giants, like Amazon, are pretty good at as well.
Thankfully, there are some proven strategies for increasing AOV that don’t depend on you simply cutting prices down to the bone. Instead, it’s about emphasising just how valuable your products are to your target customers – and here are a few examples of what we mean.
Shining a light on the quality of your products
With research undertaken by the University of Texas at Arlington in 2019 indicating that customers often associate higher prices with higher quality, this is something that you can definitely tap into with your store’s items.
When customers are convinced that a particular product offers premium features and longevity, they’re frequently prepared to pay premium prices.
So, it’s well worth considering the various means by which you can underline the quality of your products. Do the images on your product pages, for instance, draw attention to all of the different features of each product? Does the text also describe these features, and the benefits those features can have for the buyer’s life? Is the product’s quality of design and manufacture also emphasised?
Cross-selling items and accessories
The term “cross-selling” typically refers to two slightly different practices: recommending products similar to the item the customer is buying, and encouraging the customer to invest in certain extras or add-ons for that product.
Sometimes, that “extra” or “add-on” is a product that might be strictly needed in order for the first product to work – for example, a memory card for a digital camera the customer has already decided to buy. On other occasions, it might genuinely just be a nice optional extra – such as fries with your order of chicken nuggets from a fast-food restaurant.
In the case of your online store, incorporating cross-selling could be as simple a process as displaying relevant related items towards the bottom of each product page. Add some more options to the ‘thank you’ page after the customer has placed their order, to give them even more ideas for how they might spend more when they next shop with you.
Offering products in good-value bundles
Bundles can be a great way to bolster average order value, taking advantage of the tendency for many products to be purchased together. But you can go further than that, by also bundling together items the customer may not have initially considered buying together. After all, you shouldn’t be leaving the possibilities entirely to the customer’s imagination.
It may not always be an obvious move to the typical shopper, for instance, to buy not one, but multiple deodorants, each one in a different scent. If you offer a bundle of three different deodorants, not only are you enabling the customer to try out scents they might not have thought about otherwise, but you could also discount this compared to the price of buying them all separately.
Alternatively, your bundles might not consist of different versions of what is essentially the same item, but instead products that complement each other in some way. This could take the form, for instance, of a base product along with all of the necessary accessories.
Hopefully, these examples will have shown that price doesn’t have to be the start and end of how your store markets its offerings online. For more advice and guidance in relation to your brand’s e-tail presence, including to learn more about our website design and other digital marketing services, please don’t hesitate to contact the Piranha Designs team today.
