Unit economics
AOV
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.
Quantities derived from the counts. Each is only as sound as the definitions beneath it.
Is an input to
- Unit economics
- What one unit of the business earns and costs, measured so that the answer to “should we sell more of this” is arithmetic rather than opinion.
- LTV
- The contribution a customer produces across their whole relationship with the business, discounted for the fact that it arrives later.
- Contribution margin
- What is left of a sale after every cost that exists only because the sale happened.
An error in this figure does not stay in it. It reaches five numbers above it, and each of those is quoted as though it were measured.
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- Strategy and market research
- State the assumption that would change the answer, then go and test that.
- From idea to a product that exists
- Find the assumption that kills it, and test that one first.
- Client-base reactivation
- The cheapest customer already gave you their contact details.
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.