Orders
How many separate times someone bought from you in the period.
What it means
Orders is a straight count of the orders your store took in the selected period. One order counts once, whether it held a single item or twelve, and whether it was worth €20 or €2,000. It counts orders, not people — one customer buying three times in March is three orders.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Number of orders placed is every order recorded in the date range, counted at the order level — the basket, not the items inside it.
Worked example. March brings 800 orders holding 1,760 units and €81,100 of Order RevenueOrder RevenueRevenue measured at the order level.. Orders is the denominator underneath both: €81,100 ÷ 800 gives a €101 average order, and 1,760 ÷ 800 gives an AOQAOQAverage basket size across your orders.2.5 or more is healthy of 2.2.
Which is why it's the first thing to check when an average moves. An average order climbing from €101 to €120 reads as good news until you see orders fell from 800 to 400 — the same shop, minus its cheapest half.
It answers the question
How many separate decisions to buy did you win this period? Revenue can be carried by one large order; a count can't be.
Why it matters
Revenue answers to two forces at once — how many people bought, and how much each spent. Orders isolates the first, so when revenue moves you can tell a demand problem from a basket problem in a single glance.
It's the count of trips through the door. A shop can take the same money from half the customers spending twice as much, and that's a different business with different risks: fewer relationships, more concentration, and a harder month when one of them stops buying.
What good looks like
There's no universal target for an order count — it scales with the size of your store, so a number that's excellent for one shop is a bad week for another. Judge it against itself: this period against the same period last year, and against the weeks either side, using Breakdowns to see the shape rather than the total. Direction and stability are what matter — a steady climb, a hard drop when a campaign ended, a day of the week that's always thin.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Cut the checkout down | Remove optional fields, add the payment methods people abandon over, and shorten mobile checkout | Orders up on the same traffic | 1–2 weeks | Fewer fields means less data to segment on, so your email flows get blunter and the revenue they earn slips a few months later. |
| Fast Follow up abandoned checkouts | Send a three-step sequence at one hour, one day and three days | Orders up 2–5% | 2–4 weeks | If the last step carries a code you pay for orders that were arriving anyway, and the markdown lands in Discounts against your best-converting buyers. |
| Slow Widen the entry price | Add a smaller pack or starter size so a first purchase needs a smaller decision | More orders, each worth less | 1 quarter | Picking, packing and postage cost the same on a small order as a large one, so shipping cost as a share of sales climbs while orders grow. |
| Slow Buy more traffic | Raise spend on the channels already converting, then widen the audience | More orders, at a higher cost each | 2–6 weeks | Cost per order rises as you push past the cheap audience, so Contribution Margin thins even while the order count looks healthy. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Orders on its own tells you how many people bought. Next to Order Revenue, it tells you what those buyers were worth.
Growing properly
More people bought and the basket held its value. Both halves of revenue moved the right way, which is the only shape that compounds.
Cheaper baskets
You sold to more people for less money. Usually a code did the work, or demand shifted to your entry product. Volume you bought at a lower price isn't the same as demand.
Fewer, bigger orders
Revenue held on a shrinking customer base. That can be a deliberate move upmarket, or one wholesale-sized order papering over a quiet month.
Losing both
Demand fell and took revenue with it. Look for a stockout, a channel that stopped delivering, or a competitor's promotion before you touch pricing.
One counts baskets, the other counts what's in them, and they need opposite fixes. Orders up with AOQ flat is an acquisition win; Orders flat with AOQ up means merchandising did the work and your traffic problem is untouched.
The volume and the share of it that came from buyers you already had. Multiply them and you know how many of this month's orders came from repeat customers — a useful estimate of how much of next month you have to go out and buy again.
Common misreads
An order is a count, not money. A sitewide code can lift orders while revenue and margin both fall. Read it next to Order Revenue before you call it.
One order can carry twelve units. When QuantityQuantityThe core volume measure across products. climbs faster than Orders, baskets got fuller; when Orders climbs faster, you won more shoppers buying less each.
Repeat buyers are counted every time they come back, so a loyal base inflates this against the number of actual people. Returning OrdersReturning OrdersHow much of your volume loyalty drives.35% or more is healthy gives you the split.
Also called
Order count · orders placed · transactions · purchases
See yoursYour order count for the period, next to Order Revenue, with the day-by-day shape underneath.
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