How Aotea Gifts Achieved a 70% AOV Lift with Tailored Promotions 

Aotea Gifts is a 40‑year‑old specialty gift retailer in New Zealand, operating six physical stores nationwide. In‑store gift‑with‑purchase promotions have long been central to how the brand engages customers and adds value. Naturally, they needed their online store to deliver the same experience.

For a retailer with both physical and digital channels, two key challenges had to be solved:

• Replicating offline promotions for an online store: ensuring Shopify offers match the in‑store setup without disrupting the customer experience.
• Smart offer visibility: displaying promotions at the right touchpoints throughout the customer journey to capture attention and drive engagement.

This case study shows how Aotea Gifts overcame these challenges with the BOGOS app, achieving approximately 70% higher average order value (AOV) compared to store‑wide averages over the past 90 days. 

Summary

• What Aotea Gifts changed: They used BOGOS to replicate their proven in‑store promotional structures on Shopify, running multiple category‑specific offers simultaneously with tailored conditions and visibility setups.
• What you’ll learn: How to design promotions that match real buying behaviors by category, and how to make each offer visible at the right touchpoints in the customer journey.
• The big move: Instead of relying on one generic sitewide deal, Aotea segmented every offer by product line – matching thresholds, reward methods, and display placements to how customers naturally shop within each category.
• Why it matters for multi-category retailers: Stores with products at different price points and purchase frequencies cannot depend on a fixed promotion setup. Aotea’s approach shows how tailoring offers per segment drives larger baskets and stronger engagement.
• The outcome: Orders using BOGOS promotions achieved approximately 70% higher AOV compared to the store-wide average over the last 90 days, supported by layered offer visibility and responsive setup support from the BOGOS team.

The Challenge: Bringing Trusted In-Store Offers Online Without Losing Brand Consistency

Before expanding into e-commerce, Aotea Gifts had already built strong success with promotional strategies across its six physical retail stores in New Zealand. The challenge was not inventing new offers, but replicating the same proven in‑store structures online.

For a brand that showcases New Zealand’s national specialties and heritage, consistency was critical, not only to drive sales but also to maintain a professional, unified image for customers. 

Aotea needed a Shopify promotion app that could mirror its complex in‑store campaigns with detailed setups and seamless delivery. They found the solution in BOGOS. 

“BOGOS is currently the only app on the Shopify App Store that has the functionality we need to run this style of promotion properly, so it has been a great fit for us.” – said the Aotea team.

The solution: Tailored Offers by Category and Promoted Smartly

The store typically runs more than six campaigns at once, reflecting its diverse catalog of products, ranging from honey and beauty care to health items, food, and souvenirs. Each has its own price range and buying behavior. Due to this variety, a single site-wide promotion was never effective. Instead, Aotea created category‑specific offers designed to match customer expectations for each product type.

Unlike physical stores, where customers can easily notice promotions, online campaigns require careful placement to capture attention at the right moments in the shopping journey. Aotea resolved all these challenges seamlessly within a single dashboard using the BOGOS app.

Which feature did Aotea Gifts use  (why they worked)

Feature	What Aotea used	Value for stores
Free gift	Buy X get Y, Spend X get Y	Automatically adds a gift to the shopper’s cart once they meet the threshold
Discount	Free for the Cheapest	Helps maintain healthy profit margins while still rewarding customers
Booster	Today offer block, Gift thumbnail	Ensures shoppers can easily see available offers throughout their browsing journey

How Aotea Gifts Created Offers through the BOGOS app in details

#1 Freebie With Purchase to Increase Engagement and Protect Premium Positioning 

Manuka honey is Aotea’s hero product category. It carries the highest price point in the store catalog and represents the core of the brand’s New Zealand natural identity. Any promotion on this line needs to increase order volume without cheapening the product’s perceived value.

To achieve this, Aotea set up a “Buy 5, Get 1 Free” offer on all Manuka honey products, paired with 20% off shipping. 

Instead of discounting the product directly, the freebie reward encouraged bulk purchases while preserving premium positioning. The shipping discount also addressed a real barrier: honey is heavy, and shipping costs often discourage larger orders. By reducing that friction at the same threshold where customers commit to bulk buying, Aotea removed the final hesitation point.

👉 Best fit for: This offer setup works for premium product categories where brand perception matters. 

#2 Spend Threshold with Gift to Encourage Cross‑Category Discovery  

Aotea’s Nature’s Beauty Ovine Collection is a skincare line built around lanolin-based products. The offer goal here is to encourage customers to explore multiple products across the collection, besides the AOV increase target.

The store set a $250 spend threshold within the Ovine Collection. Once reached, customers automatically received a free Eye Gel from the same range, added to the cart via BOGOS’s auto‑add feature. 

Two details make this offer work well:

• First, the product selection is narrowed to a specific collection. This focuses the customer’s attention on browsing within the Ovine range, increasing the chance they discover complementary skincare products they had not considered before. 
• Second, the gift comes from the same collection as the trigger products, which reinforced trust and increased perceived value, making shoppers more comfortable than receiving an unrelated item.  

👉 Best fit for: Skincare, beauty, and wellness brands with multiple products in one collection, aiming to cross‑sell within a trusted line.

#3 Free for the Cheapest Item, Tailored by Product Category 

This is where Aotea’s promotion strategy truly stands out. Tiered discounts, such as “Buy 5, get one free”, are a proven way to boost average order value for any Shopify store. Aotea Gift takes this approach further by applying the free gift only to the cheapest item, which helps protect margins while still rewarding customers. In the market, this feature is considered an upgrade, and fortunately, BOGOS supports it, allowing Aotea to run their campaigns seamlessly.

However, rather than applying one flat volume discount across the store, Aotea created four separate “discount on the cheapest” offers, each tailored to the buying behavior of a specific product segment.

Collection	Offer condition	Strategic reasoning
Alpine Gourmet	Buy 5, get 1 free, and Buy 10, get 2 free	Low‑price items with many variants make scaling quantity easy
GO Healthy	Buy 5, get 1 free	Supplement buyers often purchase multiple products for a complete routine
The Natural Land	Buy 4, get 1 free	Routine‑based skincare where 3-4 products are needed

Below is the breakdown of each offer quantity threshold setup: 

• Alpine Gourmet lozenges: This collection sits in the low‑price range of Aotea’s catalog and comes in many flavor variants, making this high-quantity-based offer reasonable. The dual-tier structure also aimed at two clear customer segments: the first tier was accessible for casual shoppers who want to try a few flavors, while the second tier rewarded loyal customers who already enjoy the product line and are willing to stock up for themselves or their families.

• GO Healthy supplements: This worked because supplement buyers often purchase several products at once. Aotea made the offer more effective by mixing bottle sizes: 30, 60, 120, and 180 capsules. This approach appealed to loyal customers who prefer larger bottles, while the smaller 30‑count bottles serve as low‑risk samples. Together, the mix encouraged customers to expand their baskets without creating a heavy financial barrier.
• The Natural Land skincare: This collection was designed as a routine, including eye cream, mask, lip balm, etc. Aotea set the threshold at Buy 4, Get 1 Free, which matched how customers naturally build a complete skincare set. Instead of pushing them to buy more than they need, the offer naturally rewarded them for completing a basic skincare routine. 

#4 Promoted Offers on High‑Traffic Pages Using BOGOS Boosters

Setting up the right offer logic is only half the work. If customers don’t see the promotion at the right moment, even the best‑designed campaign will underperform. This is especially important for a brand like Aotea, which strives to deliver a consistent customer experience across both physical and online stores.

👉 To achieve this, Aotea used BOGOS’s built‑in promotion widgets to enhance visibility and engagement. 

1️⃣ Today Offer Block on the Special Offer Page 

Aotea activated a Today Offer Block from the BOGOS app and placed it on a dedicated Special Offer page. This gave customers a single destination to browse all active promotions at once. 

This setup aligns with how online shoppers typically browse: they want to scan deals quickly, compare options across categories, and jump directly to product pages. Additionally, the widget’s navigation button streamlined this process, saving customers time and effort. 

2️⃣ Gift Thumbnail Repurposed as an Announcement Bar 

By default, the Gift Thumbnail feature from BOGOS is used to display the products customers need to purchase to receive a gift. This display includes key components such as a countdown timer, the gift image, and the qualified quantity of the gift (as shown in the example below). 

As an alternative to the default format of this feature, Aotea leveraged and turned it into an announcement line to perfectly fit its store layout, as the image below.

3️⃣ Gift Icon on Discounted Products 

Aotea also added a Gift Icon directly on product pages with active promotions. This small badge immediately signaled to customers that the product was part of a deal, even before they read the description or scrolled further. 

What makes this approach notable is its simplicity: no extra coding was required. With support from the BOGOS team, Aotea adapted the setup to fit its store layout seamlessly. 

The Results: 70% Higher AOV on BOGOS Orders Over 90 Days 

Over the last 90 days, orders that included a BOGOS promotion achieved approximately 70% higher average order value compared to the store-wide average. The real driver behind this 70% gap was not any single offer.

👉 It was how precisely Aotea matched each promotion to the way customers already shop within each product segment and a smart strategy of displaying offers throughout the buying journey. 

Achieving this result in such a short timeframe required more than just the right offer logic; it also relied on smooth technical execution and fast implementation support. As mentioned earlier, the Aotea brand customized BOGOS’s gift thumbnail, transforming it into an announcement line that perfectly fits their store layout.

All of these detailed adjustments were carefully supported by the dedicated BOGOS support team.

“The support and development team have been excellent, and whenever we’ve needed customisation, they’ve been very responsive in helping implement code-based adjustments through chat,” said the Aotea team.

Beyond live support, Aotea also relied on BOGOS’s AI assistant and help documentation throughout the offer setup process. 

“The help documentation and AI assistant have been very useful for setup and troubleshooting. They make it easy to understand the core functionality and get campaigns live quickly,” the Aotea team added. 

Key Lessons for Other Shopify Merchants 

Aotea Gifts’ promotion setup offers several practical lessons for Shopify merchants, particularly those managing a multi-category product catalog:

• If your store sells products across different price ranges and buying behaviors, tailor each offer to its segment rather than running one sitewide deal.
• Use gift-with-purchase to protect premium positioning instead of relying on flat percentage discounts.
• Match the quantity threshold to real usage patterns, not arbitrary round numbers.
• Make offers visible at every stage of the buying journey, not just on the product page.
• Explore creative ways to take full use of your third-party Shopify app.

More importantly, the fastest way to apply all the key learnings to your store is to use a single app that handles them within one dashboard, which both saves time and costs compared to switching multiple apps at once. 

Conclusion

Aotea Gifts did not treat online promotions as an experiment. With 40 years of physical retail experience, the brand already knew what worked for its customers. The challenge was about finding the right tool to execute that strategy on Shopify. The 70% lift in AOV on BOGOS‑attributed orders proved that the choice was right.

From Aotea’s playbook, the lesson for other Shopify stores, especially those managing multiple product lines at different price points, is clear:

Tailor your offers, aligning them with specific buying use cases, and make them visible at the moments that matter most.