Unit economics
Revenue divided by the number of orders that produced it — the simplest lever on unit economics and the most volatile.
Also called Average order value · Средний чек
Formula
AOV = Revenue ÷ Orders
- Orders
- completed and paid, net of cancellations
AOV moves contribution and CAC tolerance at the same time, which is why it is usually the cheapest thing to fix: a fifteen per cent rise in average order value buys the same amount of headroom as a fifteen per cent fall in acquisition cost, and it does not require anyone to become better at advertising.
It is an average, so it hides its own distribution. A business with a long tail of large orders can raise AOV while the typical customer buys less, and the mean will not say so. Read the median alongside it.
One AOV across products with different margins is a number that cannot be acted on. A rise driven by low-margin bundles reduces contribution while the metric improves. Segment by margin band before drawing any conclusion from it.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.