One of the biggest opportunities to increase your AOV is with your Shopify thank you page (order confirmation page).
This is overlooked by almost all online stores, but the thank you page represents a golden opportunity to get your customers to spend more with absolutely zero risk to you.
If you are running paid ads from Facebook or Google then increasing your AOV needs to be one of your main priorities. Think about it. You spend the same amount of money on the customer and all you are doing is increasing how much your ROI is.
It is far easier to increase your AOV than it is to try and get more customers. This is a big mistake that many Shopify stores make. They become obsessed with “more sales”. Getting “bigger sales” is far more effective and much easier to get.
The strategy really boils down to squeezing as much as possible out of your existing store without spending more on traffic.
What is a “Thank You Page” and how to use it to get more sales?
The Shopify Thank You Page or order confirmation page is the page your customer gets redirected to once they’ve completed their purchase.
This is a pretty generic and useless page. All it really does is to give your customer a summary of the order.
All this information will be emailed to them anyway.
This Thank you page can be a huge opportunity to sell more products.
Thank about it…your customer just completed a purchase so they are definitely in a buying mood.
In fact, they are as receptive to a great deal as they will ever be.
That is why you HAVE TO present them with an offer (or multiple offers) on the thank you page. Because you already have this customer you don’t have to spend more to get a sale from them.
What you can do is to offer them an irresistible offer – a deal they can’t refuse.
Because they will only see the thank you page once, you can make it a one-time-only deal which works wonders for creating scarcity and motivating your customers to take action now.
An easy way to use your Shopify store’s thank you page
Shopify’s checkout process allows for very little customization. If you really want to you can get a Shopify expert to create a custom Shopify thank you page for you but even then you can only customize some of it.
Thankfully there’s an app for that!
It is packed with a lot of features for converting your store’s thank you page.
For something a bit more basic and much cheaper you can also use Sweet Spot Checkout Upsell. It also does the job just fine.
What these apps allow you to do is to place an offer at the very top of your thank you page.
What to put on your store’s Thank You Page?
The options are endless and there are many strategies to upsell, downsell or even cross sell a customer who just purchased something.
If you have an established store you can simply analyze your past sales to see which items customers typically purchase together. You can also analyze your email campaigns to see what customers purchase AFTER they purchased specific items.
This will give you some insights as to what offer to put in front of them.
Using common sense is also highly underrated.
You essentially want to make sure you offer your customers something that compliments the item(s) they just ordered.
Since you only have one thank you page this can be tricky if your store has a big catalogue. If you sell just a handful of products then this strategy is great.
For large catalogues I would recommend Carthook, Intercart or Smarketly as that would allow you to create specific upsells for specific products.
No matter what offer you choose to show on your thank you pages, make sure that it is truly an irresistible offer. You need to think of this as free money and don’t be afraid to sacrifice some profits.
Another very powerful strategy is to use your thank you page to show your customer exclusive products. These would be upsells or cross sells that they can not find on your store.
The scarcity alone can often motivate your customers to purchase.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Your Thank You Page to Boost AOV
To be honest, there are very few disadvantages to using your Shopify store’s order confirmation page for upsells.
Some customers might get a bit annoyed but it is really not an intrusive in-your-face approach when you use the apps mentioned above.
The downside here is that if a customer chooses to take you up on this offer they will have to go through the checkout again.
This is different from using reference transactions with Apps like Carthook Smarketly or Intercart. With these apps you can bypass the Shopify checkout and essentially design your own checkout.
The real benefit with these apps is that you can have true 1-click upsells where your customer does not have to pass through the checkout again.
That is a very powerful strategy but much more complicated to set up, test and perfect. With a simple thank you page offer you can already make some great strides to improving your AOV.
The advantages are obvious: increasing your AOV. With the same amount of traffic (and ad spent) you can get a much bigger orders which means a big difference in your bottom line.
From a customer point of view you can give your customers some really great deals on your thank you page simply because you’ve already made the sale – everything you make on top of that is just gravy.
Unlike in-cart upsells you really have no risk. You’ve already made the sale.
