Basket Size

Basket size refers to the number of products sold in a single purchase. You calculate the average basket size by dividing the total number of units sold by the total number of order transactions. This allows you to measure the difference in the average quantity of products sold in individual purchases over time.

Why Basket Size Is Important to eCommerce Brands

A cell phone shows an online shop with a basket size of two items

Your basket size and average basket size can provide insights into your average order value, and why it increases or decreases during different periods of time.

In addition, the basket size can offer a glimpse into the performance of your products, A/B testing experiments, and campaigns. It can show if you are offering the right variety of products and are satisfying your shoppers’ wants and needs at the exact moment they’re poised to purchase.

Basket size can also be a metric to understand which items are frequently bought together, how customers react to your front-end tech stack investments, the impact of external factors such as seasons and holidays on your users’ shopping habits, and more.

Best Practices to Increase Basket Size

In eCommerce, a key factor in increasing basket size is the ability to surface the most relevant products to the right shoppers at the right time. In addition to preventing shopper drop-off, providing a remarkable product discovery and customer experience can compel your shoppers to check out with more items than they intended to buy. Here’s what you can do to improve CX and increase basket size:

  • Offer product bundles – When you strategically bundle two or more products together, it can help customers feel that they are getting more from the shopping journey – especially when bundles are paired with discounts. It helps them to find more of what they’re looking for at better prices. You can include product bundles in product listing pages, product detail pages, and the checkout page.
  • Upsell and cross-sell – You can encourage customers to purchase expensive, related, or complementary products together with items they already have in their basket. The important factor here is suggesting relevant products that provide value to shoppers in the moment that they’re shopping. For example, a fashion retailer could offer a handbag that completes an outfit while a home decor brand could suggest an end table to put next to a sofa.
  • Extend free shipping – Customers consider shipping fees when purchasing. One way to get more out of individual transactions is to offer free shipping, which some shoppers will consider as “savings” that could be used to increase their basket size. Brands and retailers often choose to offer this as part of a condition, such as meeting a particular spend amount.
  • Create personalized recommendations – With personalization, you can influence customers to increase their basket size because the products they interact with are based on their search intent and chosen cart items. This also has the added benefit of making customers feel that your brand can anticipate and address their needs and know which features they appreciate.
  • Make product discovery a seamless process – Customers won’t add more items to the cart if they’re not able to find products that they have in mind. Ensure that your search bar, filters, and navigation provide the most accurate results. You can also keep shoppers engaged by not letting them miss out on new products, season sales, and discounts. Across your website, you can optimize merchandising rules by creating dynamic product collections, highlighting relevant items on search results, and promoting offers that might just be the last push that shoppers need to increase their basket size and complete their purchase.

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