What actually raises average order value on Shopify, before, during and after checkout
The techniques that move AOV on a Shopify store, sorted by where they happen: product page, cart, checkout, and after payment. What each one needs, what can go wrong, and what our app does and doesn't do.
2026-10-07 — AbakiraAverage order value goes up in two ways: a buyer adds more of the same thing, or adds something else. On Shopify, there are four places to ask: the product page, the cart, the checkout, and the pages after payment. Each one has a different cost. Before checkout you can raise the basket but you risk distracting someone who was about to buy. After payment the sale is already safe, but you only get one or two screens. What follows is a plain list of what works where, with the trade-off for each. We make an app for the after-payment part, and we’ll say where it stops.
Before checkout: the product page
Quantity breaks. “Buy 2, save 10%; buy 3, save 15%.” This is the most direct way to raise units per order, and it works best on products people use up or give away: consumables, socks, candles, supplements. It does little for a sofa. Shopify can do the discount itself with an automatic discount; an app adds the selector that shows the tiers on the page.
Bundles. Two or three products that go together, sold as a set at a small discount. They need products that genuinely belong together, otherwise they’re noise. Shopify has its own Bundles app if you want to start without installing anything else.
What it costs you. Every extra choice on a product page is one more thing between the buyer and the add-to-cart button. Test it against the page without it.
Before checkout: the cart
Free shipping threshold. If shipping is free above a certain amount and that amount sits a little above your typical order, some buyers add something to cross it. Set it from your real order values, not a round number. A progress bar in the cart showing how far they are makes the threshold visible.
Cart upsells. “Customers also bought” or a small add-on near the checkout button. They work for cheap, obvious add-ons, like batteries, a case or a refill. Anything that needs thought belongs somewhere else.
During checkout
On Shopify, checkout extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps are available only to Shopify Plus stores (Shopify, Checkout UI extensions). If you’re not on Plus, skip this section.
On Plus, the checkout can carry a small product offer, a shipping protection option, or a progress bar toward free shipping. Keep it light. This is the page where buyers abandon, and anything that slows them down costs you orders, not just upsells.
After payment
The one-click post-purchase page. It appears between payment and the order confirmation. The buyer can add an item with one tap, charged to the card they just used, without re-entering anything. The order is already won, so the offer can’t cost you the sale. The limit is eligibility: Shopify only shows this page when the first payment was a credit card, so Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, gift card and cash on delivery buyers never see it (why, in detail).
The thank-you page. Every buyer sees it, whatever they paid with. An offer here reaches the buyers the one-click page skipped. Ideally it adds the item to the same order rather than opening a second checkout.
The order status page. Buyers come back to it from the confirmation email, sometimes days later. It suits offers that don’t depend on the moment: a refill, an accessory, the next size up.
Subscriptions. For consumables, turning a one-time buyer into a subscriber is worth more than any single add-on, because it’s every future order. It can be offered right after checkout (how).
How to tell whether any of it works
Average order value alone can mislead you. A free shipping threshold can raise AOV while fewer people finish checkout. A bundle can raise AOV by moving buyers from two cheap orders to one bigger one. Watch AOV together with conversion rate and revenue per visitor. For upsells, judge each offer against the buyers who actually saw it, not against all orders.
Change one thing at a time. If you add quantity breaks, a cart upsell and a post-purchase funnel in the same week, you’ll never know which one did what.
What Post Purchase Upsell Abakira does, and what it doesn’t
It works after payment, on all three pages: the one-click page, the thank-you page and the order status page. Offers can carry variants, quantity tiers, a countdown or a subscription plan. Each one-click offer has a branch for a buyer who accepted and one for a buyer who declined, so a no can lead to a cheaper downsell. Thank-you offers can add the item to the order the buyer just placed. On the higher plans you can test up to four versions of an offer at once and sync added items to a Picqer warehouse.
For Shopify Plus stores, it also places blocks inside the checkout: product offers, delivery protection at a price you set, a stock check, a progress card and a custom badge.
It doesn’t touch your product pages or your cart. No quantity breaks on the product page, no bundles builder, no cart drawer, no free shipping bar in the theme. If that’s where your gap is, you need a different app, or none: a free shipping threshold is a setting in Shopify.
We can’t tell you what it’ll do to your AOV. That depends on what you sell and how your buyers pay, and anyone who quotes a number before seeing your store is guessing. The free plan runs on a live store, which is enough to find out whether your buyers accept anything at all. Post Purchase Upsell Abakira is on the Shopify App Store, with current plans on the listing.
Sources: Shopify, Checkout UI extensions (Plus requirement) and About product offers (post-purchase limitations). Checked on October 6, 2026.
Written by Abakira. We make small software: Shopify apps, web tools and iPhone apps. This article is about Post Purchase Upsell Abakira.