Why we built Order Bump for Shopify Plus
AOV (average order value) is one of a few pillar metrics for any e-commerce company — for many it’s the “One Metric That Matters”. It’s one of a few raw high-level numbers that you can base entire strategic decisions upon, from product development to promos. It’s a number that you’re constantly looking improve. Whether you’re a DTC brand with a few SKUs or a multi-brand marketplace the higher your AOV, the better.
Now that you’re here, I’ll introduce us. We’re the Vaan Group a digital commerce agency and we’ve spent thousands of hours figuring out different ways to increase average order value. Over the years, we’ve been contracted by huge e-commerce brands to do careful, thoughtful UX design geared towards nudging customers to a higher AOV (like we did here). And during that same period of time, we’ve tried to crack the code with code. We’ve custom built, installed, uninstalled, trialed, and re-installed dozens of Shopify apps on behalf of our high-growth DTC clients to help achieve higher AOV. Pre-cart, in-cart, post-cart, exit intent etc.
What we’ve learned is that in general tactics to drive AOV up fall into the following buckets:
• Promo/incentive driven (e.g spend x dollars and receive free shipping. Buy this get a different product at a discount % off).
• Bundling products(e.g combine these pair of white socks that look great with these white shoes and we’ll give you a discount on the socks).
• Bulk purchases (e.g the more of the same thing you buy, the cheaper the per unit cost).
Nothing earth shattering here. All of these tactics can move the AOV needle. But after implementing such tactics countless times, we realized that much of the focus is on the tactic itself and less on when in the customer journey it’s deployed. We show bundles when people are browsing, discounts too late in the process, and bulk purchases when the customer is brand new.
For this article we’ll focus on what happens within a Shopify Plus store. On any give store, we find AOV tactics at every stage of the customer journey. Announcement bars will highlight bulk deals. Product detail pages will show complete the look or related products. When a customer clicks add to cart, they’ll be bombarded with up-sell or cross-sell offers. And, in some cases, if you’re using CartHook or Bold Checkout, you’ll find a post-purchase up-sell or cross-sell on the other side of purchasing.
For the astute, you may notice that I didn’t mention offering an up-sell or cross-sell during checkout. Why? Because Shopify’s checkout is notoriously gated (so no apps) and even though Shopify Plus advertises checkout flexibility, you’re still constrained by the unique checkout token architecture. We feel this is a huge miss. Let’s look at why.
Starting with metaphor, why do checkout lines look like this?
Answer: because it’s been proven time and time again that once you’ve committed to purchasing, selling lower cost, low decision capacity products increases AOV in a retail environment. We’ll call these order bumps. Spending $100 on home goods? What’s another $5.99 on gourmet almonds with sea salt? Order bump.
But great, works IRL but how does that translate online?
Let’s zoom in on a great UX takedown of Expedia.com — a world-leading travel e-commerce platform (here’s the article: an in-depth analysis of how Expedia converts visitors into customers: Part one). One of their brilliant tactics to increase AOV includes offering multiple order bumps DURING the checkout process. First, you get exposed to complimentary products at a deep discount (i.e rental cars or rooms if you click checkout on a flight).
Next, right before you finalize payment at the checkout, you’re offered insurance — with a brilliant mix of fomo, fear, and negative opt-out working to get you to add it to your purchase.
What happened?
Praise: “Paul Rouke, Founder & CEO at PRWD previously wrote about Booking.com being the most persuasive website in the world, and after using Expedia for the first time, I think it also deserves to be ranked among the best in the business.”
Money: Expedia is a $5.73bn company with $400M in profit.
In sum, when someone reaches checkout, it usually means they’ve made the mental decision to purchase your product. Checkout is the moment of truth — every step in the customer’s journey has been leading up to this. All of the branding, web work, product development, etc. has been crafted to get them to this point.
Convincing right?
That’s why we created Order Bump for Shopify Plus merchants. Install our app and within 5 minutes you can start offering customers a product at the last step of checkout, when they’ve already committed to purchasing.
Please note, you won’t find our app in the Shopify app store because the app requires access to the checkout.liquid template which is only available for Shopify Plus merchants.
*This was written on October 5 2019 while we’re in beta.
