Thirteen ways to increase your average order value

Work out where you are today

Average order value is your revenue divided by the number of orders. That is the whole calculation, and yet most owners cannot say the number from memory.

1. Pick a period that is long enough. A month works better than a Tuesday.
2. Add up the revenue for that period, excluding VAT.
3. Count orders, not guests. One order for four people is one receipt.
4. Divide the first number by the second.

If you did €40,000 in online revenue last month across 1,600 orders, your average order value is €25.00. That is your baseline. Without a baseline you will not know in three months whether anything worked.

Then work it out again per channel. Thuisbezorgd, your own ordering page and the counter are three different averages sitting on three different cost structures. On your own page you keep the whole receipt. On a platform the commission comes off before you see anything.

Why this is the cheapest lever you have

There are only three ways to grow. More new guests. More repeat guests. Or a bigger order each time. The first costs money every single month.

An extra euro on an order that is already on its way costs you almost nothing. The driver rides the same route, the till performs the same action, the guest has already decided to eat at your place tonight. What you sell on top of that is mostly margin.

It is not really about the average

You can lift your average with a handful of enormous orders. That is not what you are after.

What you are after is your most common order getting bigger. From €25 to €32, every evening, across hundreds of receipts. That is stable revenue you can staff and buy stock against. If you run catering or fine dining, those large orders are your model instead.

You are selling to people who already want to buy

You do not have to convince anybody here. The guest is already in your basket. No advert to get them there. You only make it easy to do what they half wanted anyway: add something. Done well, that does not feel like selling. It feels like service.

Upselling starts on your own ordering page

Everything below depends on one thing: whether your guests order from you or from a platform. On Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats you do not decide what gets offered at checkout. On your own ordering page you decide all of it.

Suggest what is cheap to make

The temptation is to suggest your most expensive dish. Do not. Suggest what costs little and carries a lot of margin: a soft drink, a portion of chips, a sauce, a dessert from the fridge. It is an easy yes for the guest, and it earns you more than an expensive upgrade almost nobody takes.

Run the numbers with your own figures. Say an online order averages €30 and you keep ten per cent at the bottom of the page: €3 of profit. Sell a €3.00 soft drink alongside it and, excluding VAT, that is roughly €2.75, most of which survives the purchase price. Your receipt grows by ten per cent, your profit on that receipt by half again or more.

Teach your team to ask the same question

At the counter, your staff do the work the system does online.

• Make sure everyone knows the menu, including what is new and what is nearly sold out.
• Agree on the three things they suggest. Not everything, three.
• Put a chart by the till showing which side goes with which main.
• Reward it, and agree on how it sounds. Advice is not a sales pitch, and guests hear the difference.

Your ordering page has one advantage your team will never have: it does not forget, it does not get tired at eleven at night, and it asks every guest at the same moment.

Build a menu that grows the order for you

A menu is not a list, it is a route. The order, the grouping and the words decide what a guest orders and how much. Online that counts double, because nobody is standing beside your guest pointing at things.

Ask at the right moment

The best place for a suggestion is the checkout screen, once the main course has been chosen. Show what is commonly ordered together, in plain language. One line is enough: most people have our chips with garlic sauce alongside this burger.

Let guests build their own order

Where it suits your kitchen, give guests choices. Someone building their own pizza with buffalo mozzarella and truffle will pay more for it more readily than for the same pizza sitting ready made on the menu. They chose it. That makes the price theirs, and they come back sooner.

Put what you want to sell at the top

• The first two lines of a category get ordered most often. Put your best dish there, not your cheapest.
• Keep categories short. A guest who has to search orders less, not more.
• One good photograph beats ten mediocre ones. Without a photograph a side stays a line of text.
• Describe what is in it. House made, aged or from the wood oven sells, as long as it is true.

Prices that steer the choice

You do not have to raise your prices to raise your average order value. Often it is enough to lay the choice out differently.

That last gap is where the money is. Keep it small and a good share of your guests take the large without being asked.

Pricing psychology is not a law of nature. It is a test you run on your own menu, and roll back when it does nothing.

Combos and bundles: the same idea, a different feeling

A guest looking at a deal rarely checks whether they are better off. They see that the choice has been made for them and that something has come off the price. Meanwhile they order more than they would have separately, and your kitchen makes a fixed combination that goes out faster.

A bundle lifts an order from €25 to €45 without it feeling expensive. Two mains, two sides and two drinks at one price is an easier decision on a Thursday evening than six separate choices.

Run the numbers on every deal before you switch it on. A deal that makes your best selling dish cheaper for people who were buying it anyway costs you money. Build your bundles around dishes you sell too few of.

Attach loyalty to the receipt, not only to the visit

Most loyalty programmes reward how often somebody comes in. You can just as easily attach the reward to the size of the order.

• Give extra points for a side or a dessert alongside a main.
• Give points on combo deals and bundles, so they pull your slower dishes along.
• Make the rewards out of cheap, high margin items. A free soft drink costs you less than ten per cent off the whole receipt.
• Give new members a few points on joining. A card that is already a quarter full gets completed more often than an empty one.

That last one is a well documented effect in behavioural psychology: people are more likely to finish a sequence when they feel they have already started it.

Choose rewards whose purchase price you know off the top of your head.

Promotions that steer the size of the receipt

Set a threshold, and set it close

Free delivery above an amount is the simplest way to make an order bigger, but only when the threshold is within reach. If your most common order is around €25, then €30 is a threshold people order towards and €50 is one they ignore.

It helps on the cost side too. A delivery run costs you roughly the same whether there is €18 or €35 in the bag.

Reward the first order on your own page

A guest you move from a platform to your own ordering page is worth more than the discount that costs. You pay commission on every order, a welcome discount once. Put the offer on your packaging, on your receipts and by your till.

And on your own page you can actually switch on everything above: the checkout suggestion, the bundle, the loyalty points, the threshold. On a platform, that is not your screen.

Use the season and the fixed night

During a match, a public holiday or a fixed weekly night, people order in groups, and groups order sides and drinks. Put your bundles up front in those weeks. A dish that is only on for six weeks also gives you a reason to email and your guest a reason to order now.

What you can do on Monday

Do not expect a jump, but a couple of euros per receipt, across all receipts, every week. At four hundred orders a month, two euros more per order is eight hundred euros, with no extra guest, no extra advert and no extra delivery run.

Start where the levers are in your own hands. On your own ordering page you decide the order of the menu, the suggestion at checkout, the bundle and the threshold. It is the same reason that order costs you no commission.