Case studies / Tools4Trade
Two items, for the order that stays small.
Tools4Trade already asks for £250 and up on one brand to unlock a cheap accessory. Alongside that it runs a gift on a count. Two items from one workwear collection and a £9.99 bottle is in the cart, no code.
Visit tools4trade.co.uk ↗
01 / The problem Trade buyers already know what they came for
Tools4Trade sells power tools and workwear to people buying for a job. They arrive with a part number, and the basket was decided before the site loaded.
That leaves the usual softeners nothing to push on. The buyer is not hesitating over the purchase. They are finished with it.
What the store already runs, and what it cannot reach
- Price discounts
- Tool prices get compared across a handful of large distributors. Discounting means matching whoever is cheapest that week, which moves the margin rather than the basket. AOV.ai analysis
- Free shipping
- Delivery is already free over £100 and £3.99 below it. Two workwear items at the middle price come to about £60, which leaves this order under the line anyway. tools4trade.co.uk
- Spend thresholds
- The store runs one for each big brand. Spend enough on Milwaukee, DeWalt or Makita and an accessory unlocks for a pound or two. The lowest of the three asks for £250 in a single brand, more than four times the order this gift is built for. tools4trade.co.uk
So what reaches the order that was never going to get there?
02 / The campaign Three offers, all counted in items
All three are counted in items. Buy the required number from a named group and the gift is in the cart before checkout, no code and no total to watch.
It is worth reading what each rule prevents. One gift per order, so a bigger basket never costs more in stock. Added automatically, so there is no code and no moment where the shopper wonders whether they qualified. No end date, so the bottle reads as part of the collection rather than a promotion to wait out. No cap per customer, so the offer still stands the next time the same trade buyer orders.
The collection sets the price of all this. Workwear runs from £7.99 to £182.50, middle price £29.99, so two items is about £60 of cart for a £9.99 gift, roughly a sixth of the order. It is also just under a quarter of the cheapest brand threshold the store runs.
03 / The outcome The counter belongs to the slot, not to the offer
Orders that took the workwear gift.
That number is worth less than it looks. The campaign behind it has not always held this offer. It opened on the store's broad Safety and Workwear collection, giving away Milwaukee winter gloves, then swapped to the £9.99 bottle and a collection of 162 products built for it. Same record, same code, same trigger of two items, and the counter ran straight through. Between 19 and 32 of those orders took gloves.
Now the useful part. Once the bottle became the gift, nothing in that campaign moved: not the gift, not the collection, not the count. The pace still swung three to one, from a third of an order a day to a whole one. A claim counter cannot tell you what a setting did.
The other two counters read in the low forties for the DeWalt cap and three for the Festool adapter, and neither belongs next to the workwear counter. The workwear campaign has run for months, the Festool one for weeks, and the cap campaign is the newest of the three. Counters that started on different days do not line up.
An earlier AOV.ai write up put average order value up 20 per cent in three months. The same article says 22 per cent in its own web address and 27 per cent in its body, a rise from £285 to £362. Three numbers for one claim. It also describes three £399 collection thresholds on Milwaukee, DeWalt and Makita, and nothing of that shape runs through the app now. The brand thresholds this store runs today sit in its own theme and sell the accessory cheap rather than give it away.
04 / What this case shows Price the trigger off the middle of your collection
The shape is simple enough to copy, and it is not a replacement for a spend threshold. Tools4Trade runs both. A brand threshold works on an order that is already large in one brand. A count works on the order that was never going to get there.
What sets the count is the middle price of the collection you attach it to, not the order you wish people placed. £29.99 is the middle of that workwear collection, so two items is about £60, just under a quarter of the smallest brand threshold this store asks for. That is a request an ordinary customer can meet on the way to the checkout.
So two questions. Do two items at your own median reach a number your ordinary order already hits? And would the same buyer want the second item on the same day? Two workwear items, yes. Two of the same drill, no.
It stops working when the trigger is rare, and this store runs its own control. The Festool campaign asks for one of four specific drills, carries the most expensive gift at £34.99, and has taken three orders in about six weeks. The workwear campaign takes roughly one order every day and a half. The prize was never the problem. Qualifying was.
