Average order value (AOV) is one of the few WooCommerce metrics you can move without spending a cent more on traffic — the shoppers are already on the site, already adding to cart. The techniques below are the ones we’ve built the EcomDrama plugins around, in roughly the order most stores see results.
Show shoppers how close they are to a reward
A discount that only appears on the coupon field does nothing to change behaviour — shoppers who don’t already know it exists will never go looking for it. A progressive reward ladder flips that: as soon as a shopper adds their first item, they see exactly how much more gets them free shipping, a percentage off, or a free gift, with a live progress bar that updates as the cart changes.
This is the core idea behind Progressive Discount — you set the thresholds and rewards once, and the plugin handles showing the right message at the right moment on the Cart page, Checkout page, and inside the cart drawer if you’re also running Side Cart. Because the message updates live as items are added, the incentive to add one more item stays visible for exactly as long as it’s relevant.
Make the cart itself sell
WooCommerce’s default cart sends shoppers away from the page they were just browsing on — every trip to a separate Cart page is a chance for them to get distracted and never come back. A cart drawer keeps them where they are: adding a product opens a panel over the current page instead of navigating away, so the next click is almost always “keep shopping” rather than “leave the site.”
Side Cart also gives that drawer a built-in “you may also like” section, so the highest-intent moment in the whole shopping session — right after an add to cart — is also the moment a shopper sees a relevant second product, rather than that opportunity being wasted on a page they’re about to leave.
Bundle products people already buy together
Some products only make sense as a set — a lamp and its replacement bulb, a desk and a cable organiser. Asking a shopper to notice that and add both separately relies on them doing the thinking for you. Smart Cross Sell lets you curate those combinations directly, with fallback rules to cover the products you haven’t bundled by hand, so the “these belong together” suggestion is there before the shopper has to think of it themselves.
Start with the one that fits your store today
These three work well together, but none of them require the other two to be worth doing on their own. If your margins can absorb a reward ladder, start there — it’s the one shoppers notice before they’ve added anything at all. If your catalogue already has obvious pairings, bundling is the faster win. Either way, the goal is the same: give the shopper who is already on your site one more good reason to add one more thing to their cart.