<b>The average order value that lied across borders</b>

<b>The average order value that lied across borders</b>

An outdoor-gear shop watched its average order value sink for two months and braced for a discounting problem that wasn't there.

The clue was hidden in a geography breakdown. A new market had launched in a weaker local currency, but the ecommerce tag passed raw amounts without converting, so 9,000-unit local orders were being logged as if they were dollars at one-tenth the value, dragging the global average down.

They normalized all revenue to a single reporting currency at capture time and reprocessed the period.

Global average order value corrected from a panicked $41 back to its real $58, and the imaginary discounting crisis evaporated.

The lesson: one currency in a report is the only safe currency. Mixed money turns a healthy launch into a fake decline.