Average order value: the number that moves without spending anything
Average order value is revenue divided by order count. It is the least glamorous of the three growth levers — more visitors, better conversion, bigger baskets — and usually the cheapest to move, because it requires no additional traffic.
A 10% increase in average order value drops almost entirely to the bottom line. A 10% increase in traffic does not, because you paid for the traffic.
Read the median too, not just the mean
One €900 order in a day of thirty €40 orders drags the average up by nearly €30 and tells you nothing about the typical customer. If your catalogue has a wide price range, the mean will mislead you regularly.
A practical habit: look at the average alongside the largest order of the period. When they move together, the average moved because of one outlier. When the average moves and the maximum does not, something real changed in normal buying behaviour.
Levers that work in a small store
- Free shipping above a threshold set just above your current average — the most reliable lever there is, and the easiest to measure
- Bundles that solve a real use case, not arbitrary product pairings
- A genuinely relevant add-on at checkout, not a random cross-sell
- Volume pricing on consumables people were going to reorder anyway
- Removing choice paralysis on your top product — fewer variants often means larger orders
The shipping threshold deserves the first attempt. Set it too high and it does nothing; set it just above your average and a meaningful share of customers add one more item to clear it.
Watch it weekly, not daily
Average order value is noisy day to day in a store doing fewer than fifty orders daily — a couple of unusual purchases swing it by 20%. Read it weekly or monthly, where the noise averages out and a real change becomes visible.
This is exactly why WhatsReport lets you pick the frequency independently: a daily message for revenue, orders and stock, and a weekly or monthly one for the slower metrics that only make sense over a longer window.