AOV (average order value)
Revenue divided by number of orders: what the average shopper spends per checkout, and the number every upsell is trying to move.
See it
What it is
AOV is total revenue divided by order count over a period. Nothing fancier than that. It matters because you have two ways to make more money: get more orders (expensive, you pay for traffic) or get more per order (cheap, the shopper is already holding their card). Every bundle, order bump, free-shipping threshold, and 'frequently bought together' row exists to push this one number.
Reach for AOV when ad costs are eating your margin. The classic moves, roughly in order of effort: a free-shipping progress bar ('you're $12 away'), a cross-sell block on the cart drawer, product bundles priced just under the sum of the parts, and a post-purchase upsell after payment where there is nothing left to lose.
Gotcha: AOV rises when you discount deeply enough to move big carts, and your accountant will not thank you. Watch it next to contribution margin per order, and decide whether to compute it before or after discounts, shipping, refunds, and tax. Two dashboards quoting different AOV numbers usually just disagree about that.
Ask AI for it
Build an AOV panel for my store admin. Compute average order value as gross revenue divided by order count for a selected date range, show it as a big number with the percentage change against the previous period and a sparkline of the daily trend. Add a second toggle for net AOV (after discounts, refunds, and shipping) so the two can be compared side by side, and break the number down by traffic source in a small sortable table underneath.