What is average order value (AOV)?

How to calculate it

Divide revenue by orders for the same period. Decide first what counts as revenue and keep it consistent: most shops use the order total before refunds, excluding shipping and tax, but some include them. In the worked table, March revenue of $18,400 from 400 orders gives $46. April grew in both revenue and orders, so AOV only edged up. In May the order count was the same as March, but revenue rose, so the whole gain came from larger orders.

What moves it

Anything that makes each order bigger: a free shipping threshold set above the current average, bundles that sell a set at a saving, relevant cross-sells such as an infuser with loose tea, volume pricing, and larger pack sizes. Things that make orders smaller include deep discounts on single items and promotions aimed at first time buyers. Baymard Institute's research on why shoppers abandon checkouts lists extra costs such as shipping as the leading reason among those ready to buy, which is why the threshold is the lever most shops try first.

Why it matters

AOV sets what a shop can afford to spend to get and serve an order. If shipping a parcel costs $11 and the margin on a $46 order is $18, free shipping on every order eats most of the profit; a $60 threshold might not. Advertising works the same way: a cost per order of $15 is fine at an AOV of $58 and painful at $25. Shopify's guidance on the metric makes the same point, treating AOV as a planning number rather than a vanity figure.

Common mistakes

Mixing periods, such as revenue for a month divided by orders for a quarter. Counting refunded or cancelled orders as revenue. Reading AOV without the order count, so a month with fewer but larger orders looks like a win when revenue fell. Chasing AOV with discounts that cost more margin than they add. And comparing your AOV with figures from shops selling very different products.

Where it shows up in the product

OneCraft has no ready made store; the agent builds one from capability guides into the site's own database. The orders guide stores each order's subtotal, shipping, discount, tax and total, and gives the admin an order list filtered by status with a tile showing today's orders, so revenue and order counts for an AOV calculation come from paid orders there or from the Stripe dashboard. Payments run through Stripe Checkout as a direct charge on the owner's connected Stripe account, with prices read from the site's database rather than the browser, on paid plans only; the platform fee is 2 percent on Starter, 1 percent on Pro and 0.5 percent on Pro+, with Stripe's own fees on top.

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