What is AOV (Average Order Value)?

AOV (average order value) is the average amount a customer spends per order. It determines how much room you have to pay for traffic and still profit.

Formula: AOV = Total Revenue / Number of Orders

Why it matters

AOV is the ceiling on your acquisition math: with the same CPA, a higher AOV means healthier margin on every sale. Stores lift it with bundles, quantity breaks, upsells, and free-shipping thresholds, but creative plays a role too — ads that feature bundles or premium use cases pull higher-value orders. Watch AOV alongside conversion rate, since aggressive upselling can raise AOV while suppressing how many people check out at all.

Reading the signals

• Good: AOV rising while conversion rate holds — bundles and upsells are landing
• Bad: AOV up but CVR down sharply — the offer got heavy and is scaring off buyers
• Bad: paid traffic producing consistently lower AOV than organic — ads are attracting bargain hunters

What to do about it

What you advertise shapes what people buy, so test creatives built around bundles, routines, and multi-unit offers, not just the hero product alone. Polaris makes it cheap to generate those offer-angle variations inside Claude and compare which ones raise the value of the resulting carts. See the full ecommerce ads glossary, or put it into practice with the Polaris AI UGC ad generator.