Increasing your site’s traffic can be expensive — you may have to invest in advertising, partnerships, or content marketing. Likewise, optimizing your current traffic to improve conversion rates may not be cheap either. It requires time and money invested in A/B testing and may not improve revenue overall.
Increasing order values can be a great initial strategy to drive more revenue, and we wrote about 8 strategies to increase average order value last week that makes a great place to start (and should probably be read first).
We’re looking into tools and extensions that can help you implement those strategies to drive revenue and create more valuable orders. Today we’re looking at how to increase average order value with WP eCommerce.
WP eCommerce has the ability to set a free shipping threshold built into the plugin. You can enable this under Settings > Store > Shipping and enabling “Free Shipping Discount”, then entering your amount:
If the cart subtotal is below your threshold, your other shipping methods will be shown. If the subtotal is above the threshold, the shipping cost will automatically be $0. The downside here is that free shipping is available to all customers, even international customers, so be aware of this when setting your threshold.
If you want to restrict free shipping to certain countries, you can do so with the WP eCommerce Premium Shipping ($35) plugin. While this plugin gives you tons of flexibility in shipping rates (such as amount-based, weight-based, and other shipping methods), you can improve the free shipping you offer by restricting it to country.
A free shipping override will work similarly to the core override, but you can also set up tiered flat rates.
If you set up a new rate, you can set your rate for orders from $0 to $60, then set free shipping for orders over $60, and this rate can be for a particular country.
Now you need to let customers know about your free shipping offer. Hello Bar is a good choice for this, and it this will add a notice to the top of your site. You can create a bar for your shipping promotion:
And then use the content of this bar to show your free shipping message:
This can be shown throughout your site on every page so customers know about this order minimum and are encouraged to meet it.
If free shipping isn’t for you (or you offer it already), you can use a discount threshold instead to drive orders — this lets you offer a coupon only for minimum order amounts, i.e., “Get 5% off any order over $60 with the code: 5foryou”.
WP eCommerce allows you to do this via a subtotal amount required to use a coupon code. You can set this as a condition when you create the coupon:
If the cart subtotal does not meet this threshold, the coupon cannot be applied to the order.
Again, you’ll need to let customers know about this discount. Hello Bar could help out with advertising this coupon code just as it did in our free shipping example above. You can also look into using the available widget areas in your theme to include this in your footer or sidebar.
You can also encourage purchasing larger quantities of an item to increase order value rather than encouraging a minimum order subtotal.
WP eCommerce has quantity discounts for products built directly into the plugin, which is a huge win for store owners. You can set them up with the product pricing by clicking “Add Quantity Discount”.
This can let you create several “tiers” of discounts to incentivize larger purchases. You can use your product short description or regular description to let customers know of these quantity discounts.
Bundling will be something WP eCommerce store owners will have to set up manually, as there’s no feature or extension to help out with this.
You could create a bundle by adding products individually to your store, then adding a new product that represents a bundle instead. For example, I could have SKUs for Product 1, Product 2, and Product 3. I’d then create a new product / SKU for a bundle of all three products, and set my pricing as desired for the bundled version.
This will force you to track inventory manually if the bundle is purchased, but will let leverage bundles to encourage higher order amounts.
WP eCommerce doesn’t strictly have upsell or cross-sell capabilities available, but there are a couple of ways you can cross sell your products.
First, the plugin has a setting under Settings > Store > Marketing that should be useful. You can enable “Users who bought this also bought” to display related products on your single product pages.
Similarly, you could use a free related products plugin to show products from the same category on the product page, but this plugin will require update for some old code (it will throw deprecated notices when installed). You can use it, but you’d be better off by having a developer upgrade it for you.
If you’d like a supported / upgraded version, you can also take a look at the Related Products add-on ($53.90) from Visser Labs.
Each of these options can help you show upsells or cross-sells automatically. However, there’s nothing stopping you from manually displaying upsells or cross-sells for your products. If you’d like to, you can add upsells and cross-sells to product pages manually instead. Add the cross sell or upsell to the bottom of your product description, with your own image and text, and it will be displayed before the “Add to cart” buttons for the product:
Offering loyalty points in exchange for purchases can be a very useful way to incentivize customers to purchase more, as they feel like they’re getting something in return for completing the purchase on your site.
We’ve already written about you can create a WP eCommerce loyalty program, which requires the Shopper Rewards plugin ($79). This can let you reward customers for purchases on your store with points.
While you can’t offer bonus points for individual products, you can drive sales by adjusting your store’s rate for earning points overall. For example, “double-point weekends” can drive sales for a limited time, while offering loyalty points in general can boost overall sales since customers gain something in return for repeat purchases.
There’s no built-in way to charge product or checkout fees, nor are there extensions available to do so. However, we can do a bit of a workaround to be able to charge product fees, which will work for simple products (with no variations).
First, you’ll need to enable per-product shipping fees under Settings > Store > Presentation:
This will allow you to set shipping fees for your simple products, which is multiplied by the quantity purchased and added to the order shipping rate.
Set a product fee
Now I can use this as a charge for personalization or another upsell. This fee isn’t optional and can’t be selected by the customer, so it’s added for every purchase — something to be aware of when you set this up.
I’m going to use this for personalization, as WPeC includes the ability to enable personalization messages for every product without an extension.
The reason I called this fee setup a workaround is that the fee is shown throughout your shop as a shipping cost rather than a personalization fee (or other kind of fee).
We can use the Say What plugin to help us out here by “translating” that “Shipping:” text to something else, such as “Personalization Fee:”
Replace the shipping label
When we do so, this will be used on our product page instead of “Shipping:” with our fee.
Now let’s talk about the cart. Unfortunately this will be lumped in with your shipping, as mine currently shows my $3.99 personalization fee plus my $4.99 order shipping as one shipping line item total.
While you could tinker with this yourself, a quick fix is to label this “Shipping and fees” rather than just a shipping cost:
Change cart shipping label
If you want to charge other fees for upsells or other services, you’d need custom code to do so.
And now on to our final strategy to increase average order value with WP eCommerce: raising prices.
WP eCommerce has a bulk edit action to update product prices. However, this lets you enter an amount for the price, but doesn’t let you set an increase amount or percentage, so it probably can’t be used for all of your products at once. For example, you could bulk-update all prices in your shop to $20, but you can’t increase them all by $2 or 3% at once.
You can still update prices manually, so this strategy can be implemented, but requires more time invested.
There are some helpful tools for increasing average order value for WP eCommerce stores. Our 8 strategies can all be implemented, though some require manual set up or can’t leverage advanced techniques without custom code. The manual time required for many of these strategies, however, is minimal enough to be worthwhile in an attempt to drive increased revenue from your existing orders.
