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8 Effective Ways to Increase Your Average Order Value

You’re getting regular customers on your site, and the conversion rate is also high but still, you can’t crack the expected revenue. That means your average order value (AOV) is lower than normal.

The average order value (AOV) is the average amount of money people spend while purchasing products/services from your online store.

Average order value is an important metric for all data-driven businesses to evaluate marketing efforts and pricing strategies. It helps you identify the average money spent on each order placed across your business channels. So you can effectively update and optimize your business plan that will significantly impact your bottom line.

Do you ever think about increasing your average order value instead of increasing customer numbers? Then you have come to the right place.

Today, you’ll learn about the importance of knowing the average order value for your business, how to calculate it, and 8 effective tips to increase average order value.

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What is Average Order Value (AOV)

Average Order Value is a crucial eCommerce metric that measures how much money customers spend on your site over a defined period.

AOV is one of the most useful KPIs for online businesses. It helps you identify different customer groups according to their expenditure. Or you can determine the channels that are most powerful in terms of revenue.

By analyzing these metrics you can easily make effective decisions for your marketing strategies. Such as advertising spending, store layout, and product pricing.

Why is Average Order Value Important

Getting customers is one of the biggest challenges for online retailers. That’s the reason they craft their all strategies and pay key attention to bringing customers to their shop. But you can even increase your revenue by simply improving the AOV.

Suppose you need to spend $1 to get a visitor to your store (including website maintenance, paid ads, online support, etc). Now, would it be more beneficial for you if 5 customers buy 7 products for $100 or if 2 customers spend $100? No doubt the second approach will be more beneficial.

importance of average order value

This is proven that emphasizing more on the consumers ready to spend money on your site is more impactful rather than running after new customers.

You can take an example from super shops. They always keep similar types of products in one block. Such as tea bags, milk, and sugar. It helps them increase their AOV by tickling the interest of consumers. You can use the same tactic on your eCommerce store by offering subsidiary products when someone intends to order something. It’ll surely increase your AOV. And ends with a great hike in your profit margin.

Related Resource: 15+ Common Ecommerce Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2022.

How to Calculate Average Order Value

How to calculate average order value

In order to calculate your average order value, just take your total revenue and divide it by the total number of orders.

Average order value = Total Revenue / Total Number of Orders

For example, you have an online store that sells cosmetics. In December, people ordered 200 pieces of different products and you generated $2500 in total revenue.

Then, your average order value will be: $2500/200 = $12.5

This means a customer spends $12.5 on average for each purchase made from your eCommerce.

How to Check Your Average Order Value

Before planning on how to increase the average order value for your eCommerce, you need to know the current AOV. You can calculate the AOV as we’ve shown above. Alternatively, if you integrate your eCommerce shop with Google Analytics you can check the AOV from there as well.

If you don’t configure your Google Analytics yet check how to use the eCommerce tracker and generate more sales.

Now, go to the official Google Analytics website and log into your Analytics account. Then, navigate to Conversions  eCommerce  Overview. Here, you can select the Avg. Order Value from the drop-down menu and see the AOV along with many other metrics.

ecommerce overview

After getting the current AOV, now it’s time to optimize your marketing strategies for better results.

8 Ways to Increase Average Order Value

A small increase in your average order value will have a big impact on your bottom line. But it largely depends on how you develop your marketing strategies and treat your buyers.

Below are the tips to optimize your eCommerce shop so you can encourage customers to enlarge their cart sizes and, therefore, increase your shop’s overall AOV-

  1. Offer a Free Shipping Threshold
  2. Leverage Your Audience with Limited-Time Offers
  3. Make Your User Journey Special & Effective
  4. Display Cross-sell And Up-sell Items
  5. Provide Bundle Deals and Bulk Options
  6. Arrange a Customer Loyalty Program
  7. Offer a Free Gift or Gift Card with a Purchase
  8. Include a Flexible Return Policy

1. Offer a Free Shipping Threshold

offer free shipping threshold

Free shipping has become one of the strongest marketing tools for eCommerce brands. You can use this tool to boost your average order value as well.

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13 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs in 2022

If you have chosen WordPress then you are on the right track as a blogger. WordPress is the best CMS (Content Management System) and rules over 42% of the website on the entire internet. 

All this can happen due to its super user-friendliness and super-easy installation. You can customize your website without being a tech geek. Moreover, you don’t need to know a single line of code. 

Another unbeatable thing about WordPress is, that there are plenty of plugins in this community. Most of them are free and paid ones are not much pricy.

This article is specially organized for bloggers who are searching- for the best WordPress plugins for blogs!

So, try to read till the end, you won’t regret it. 

Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs at a Glance

best wordpress plugins for blogs

You will get a huge number of plugins in WordPress.org but the question is which one is the best for your blog? Which one will make it easy for your audience to check your content and navigate through your site? Well, here we have listed some plugins for you.

  1. Yoast SEO
  2. Akismet
  3. Elementor Page Builder
  4. Google Analytics Dashboard
  5. Really Simple SSL
  6. WP User Frontend
  7. weForms
  8. Smush Image Compression
  9. Add To Any
  10. Revive Old Post
  11. weMail
  12. WP Project Manager
  13. Disable Comments

Let’s check the details.

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WordPress Birthday: Expert Opinions on Recent Gossip and weDevs Special Deals!

oday (May 27) is WordPress’s birthday. It’s been 19 years since American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little launched the initial version of WordPress in 2003. To mark this occasion, let’s show you some of the biggest milestones in WordPress history.

According to W3Techs, WordPress empowers 43% of all websites on the internet- such a big achievement!

However, it’s time for celebration 🎉. Be a part of this amazing journey to know how WordPress comes to its today’s position:

How It All Starts with Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little

WordPress history

It’s a long 19 years story of two extremely talented people- Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. They launched the first version of WordPress on May 27, 2003. This open-source platform wasn’t just a copy of its predecessor. Rather the partners started this program with a bigger vision of making website building easier for all.

The WordPress software is written in PHP language. Besides, it uses MySQL for maintaining the database. Christine Selleck Tremoulet suggested the name WordPress. He is a prolific blogger and a friend of Mullenweg. Later he became the co-founder of WordPress.

At first, WordPress strengthen its position as the world’s most popular blogging platform.

But gradually, it became the top choice for business websites as well.

The Revolution WordPress Brings to The CMS Industry

revolution-in-web-development

Since launched in 2003, WordPress breaks the conventional trend of web development.

The best part about WordPress is that it’s free, incredibly flexible, and gives you complete design freedom. Now anyone can build different types of websites regardless of technical skill.

On top of that, new additions and continuous improvements make WordPress history more incredible. WordPress supports a rich library of interactive themes and plugins hence it enlarges the customization arena to infinity. WordPress diminishes the concept- Only programmers can build a website.

Timeline of Major Features and Events from WordPress History

It’s really difficult to describe the entire journey in this short time. Here, we picked some major events from WordPress history.

2003Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little released WordPress
2005Introduced the Theme system, a modified user role system, and a new backend UI. New releases: Version 1.5 (Strayhorn), Version 2.0 (Duke)
2008Introduced the WordPress Theme Directory and today’s admin dashboard through the releases of Version 2.5(Brecker), Version 2.6 (Tyner), and Version 2.7 (Coltrane)
2009Streamlined web development workflows. New releases: Version 2.8 (Baker), Version 2.9 (Carmen)
2012Introduced theme customizer & previews as well as a new media manager. New releases: Version 3.4 (Green) & Version 3.5 (Elvin)
2015Focused on mobile experience and improved responsive images and embeds. New releases: Version 4.2 (Powell), Version 4.3 (Billie) & Version 4.4 (Clifford)
2017Refined theme customizer, new gallery widget, modified text, and video widgets. New releases: Version 4.8 (Evans) & Version 4.9 (Tipton)
2018Introduced new block-based editor Gutenberg with a new default theme “Twenty Nineteen”. New releases: Version 5.0 (Bebo)
2020Focused on speed and security improvements to WordPress. New releases: Version 5.4 (Adderley), Version 5.5 (Eckstine), & Version 5.6 (Simone)
2021Simpler layout to make web development easier. New release: Version 5.7 (Esperanza). Improvement in the block system.
2022Introducing a new default theme “Twenty Twenty-Two” including many advanced admin facilities. Gutenberg’s writing improvements.

WordPress Timeline at a glance

WordPress Birthday: Let’s Learn What Experts Thinking about WordPress Growth, Gutenberg, Full Site Editing, SEO, and More

Happy Birthday WordPress

Recently, we’ve talked to many developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and influencers about WordPress. We had a set of questions for them on the occasion of WordPress’s 19th birthday.

  • What are they thinking about WordPress’s overall growth and market share
  • How will ‘Full Site Editing’ (and Gutenberg Editor) affect the industry?
  • How effective are the recent updates of WordPress with Content Management and SEO?
  • And finally- the future of WordPress!

Let’s find out what the experts think. We believe you will enjoy our initiative and this will help you be more optimistic about WordPress in the upcoming days.

Recent Drop in WordPress Market Share

“Honestly, I don’t think that the “sudden drop” in market share is unexpected or significant.
Businesses close. People are retiring. How many people have died from COVID?
How are we measuring our market share?
If businesses want to be on Squarespace, that is fine. When they need scale, WordPress will be here with open arms.
I think it is also notable that many hosting companies have imposed sanctions against Russian and Belorussian websites. How many of them were in WordPress? Can the drop be accounted for because of sanctions?
Every market has a rise and fall.
What WordPress end users want is predictability. I would love to see major changes slow down after the release of Full Site Editing (FSE).
Backward compatibility was always one of the UVPs of WordPress. We need to get you a happy compromise with our new editor and attrition.” –Bridget Willard

Bridget Willard is a marketing consultant, especially well known for her brand building for Riggins Construction, GiveWP, and the Make WordPress Marketing Team.

WordPress Full Site Editing

“CMS like WordPress have come a long way. I remember when I was using b2/cafelog and the beginning of WordPress, when you had just a blogging platform, and manually created pages in PHP, and then created an iframe focused theme so the blog and the pages could all be under one uniform design. Years later, developers started making page builders to help code less, and design more.
This being said, even outside of WordPress, with other types of CMS, offering a page builder experience that the user can see how their site is coming together live before their eyes, has become a thing of today. There’s still a lot of accessibility issues and education for the users wanting to learn CMS, but these are solvable solutions. I encourage local WordPress meetups and WordCamps to do more workshops based on different page builders, and even the Gutenberg editor.”-Nile flores

Nile flores is an expert web designer, public speaker, and WordPress developer from Centralia, Illinois. She also has expertise in graphic design.

“Full Site Editing and WordPress leaves a lot to be desired when you’ve been using WordPress for as long as I have transitioning from using template files and template parts and still trying to use tools like ACF require a whole new way of approaching a problem. I really wish FSE would look at the existing solutions and borrow from them. Beaver Builder and Divi have been doing full site editing for a while now and works quite well.” -Jason Tucker

Jason Tucker is a professional WordPress website developer. Also, he has over 10 years of experience in podcasting.

WordPress Content Management

“I have been in the WordPress space since 2006. Of course, a lot has changed since then, and competition is fierce. But the one thing I know, with certainty, is that the industry is wide open, and the opportunity to succeed and make good money has never been greater.” -Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner is the founder of Authentik and the first person who started selling premium themes.

“WordPress has come a long way over the years but as each year passes it seems to become easier and easier for non developers to see their website vision come to life without touching a single line of code. As new technology emerges and integrates with WordPress can you imagine the ease of use in the future? I’m looking forward to building with WordPress by just thinking about it.” -Brian Messenlehner

Brian Messenlehner put himself to utilizing WordPress for more than a blogging system. Also, he is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com.

“Happy Birthday, WordPress and to everyone that has been a part of the community that has been instrumental in bringing it to this 19th anniversary. It’s because of them I have been able to make a 15-year career in a diverse, open-source community. The flexibility of the CMS rides on the back of what has brought me success in the space. And lastly, cheers to WordPress for making it possible for me to meet, work with and become friends with some of the coolest and most talented people in the world.” -Bob Dunn

Bob Dunn works as a blogger and Podcaster at Bobwp. Also, he has expertise in different areas of web development including WordPress, eCommerce, and monetization.

WordPress SEO

“Over the past decade, I’ve enjoyed writing thousands of blog posts and helped grow sites organically from zero to 1+ million visitors per month. And there is one thing these projects all had in common; WordPress was always at the foundation.
Here are just a few reason why I think WordPress is an excellent choice for anyone doing SEO.

First, you have a wide range of different SEO plugins you can use. This gives you flexibility regarding features you might need for a specific project, such as structure data, redirects, sitemaps, rich snippets, etc. Lately, I’ve been a fan of The SEO Framework plugin.
Second, being open source and written in a popular programming language (PHP), there are plenty of ways to manipulate WordPress to do exactly what you need it to. This enables you to stay on top of any changes Google makes regarding SERPs. Try customizing Shopify or Wix; you only have so many options.
Third, WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform. And to this day, that’s why I still love it. It makes blogging and content creation a breeze! ” -Brian Jackson

Brian Jackson is the Co-founder at forgemedia. He was the Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsta. Brian is a blogger/author obsessed with SEO and webperf.

“WordPress plugins offer an incredible range when it comes to SEO. A couple of native additions stand out the most for me. This is, of course, responsiveness and WebP image support. An automatically mobile-friendly layout makes engaging those users much less of a hassle, and optimized imagery always makes Google happy. Of course, Google has been pushing WebP since 2010. Still, it’s nice to use those images without having to force mime types in WordPress.” -Anna Gargioni

Anna Gargioni is an experienced marketing and branding professional. She is very active in the WordPress community.

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Lorem Ipsum

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Where does it come from?

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackam.

Where can I get some?

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.