You might already know your top-line revenue and your average order value (AOV). But if you’re not looking at average selling price (ASP), you’re likely missing a large part of the story. ASP shows you how pricing, product mix, discounting, and customer behavior play out in real time. When monitored, ASP can become one of the sharpest tools in your growth strategy. Below, we’ll explain what ASP in sales means, how to calculate it, and how to track it automatically using tools such as Stripe Sigma.

What’s in this article?

• What does ASP mean in sales?
  
• Why is ASP important for business growth?
  
• How do you calculate ASP in sales?
  
• How can Stripe Sigma help?
  

What does ASP mean in sales?

ASP stands for “average selling price.” It’s the average amount customers pay over a given period. For example, if you brought in $50,000 in revenue from 500 sales of your software product, your ASP is $100.

ASP isn’t a profit metric, and it doesn’t account for costs. It tells you how much money, on average, each sale brings in. ASP can help you understand what your sales are worth at the transaction level, and it’s a useful reference point for pricing, forecasting, and growth decisions.

Some businesses use the term “average sales price” and “average selling price” interchangeably. Either usage works, as long as you’re consistent in what you’re measuring. ASP can measure sales of a specific product or service or sales of all the products and services you offer.

Why is ASP important for business growth?

ASP tells you what your customers are paying across every transaction. And that number tracks the effects of your strategies around pricing experiments, discounting, segmentation, bundling, upgrades, and down-sells. It’s the receipt for your entire revenue model.

Here’s what you can gain from ASP.

A live read on pricing power

If ASP is rising, it usually means either customers are moving toward higher-priced plans or products on their own, or your sales team (or pricing page, or onboarding flow) is doing a better job of nudging them there. If ASP is dropping, you’ll want to determine if that’s because of broader adoption of entry-level options, an uptick in discounting, or a shift in customer behavior you didn’t anticipate.

ASP can highlight those trends quickly—before the quarter ends and you realize you hit your sales targets but left a chunk of revenue on the table.

A way to spot your most valuable segments

Not all customers buy the same thing, and ASP can help you see who’s spending what. You might find that one particular segment—for instance, users on annual contracts in certain regions—has an ASP that’s twice as high as the rest. With that insight, you now know where to focus product development, where to spend ad budget, and which conversations your sales team should prioritize.

A sharper lens for forecasting

Modeling growth is ideal, but the formula “Number of New Customers × Price” is only helpful if you know what your customers tend to pay. If you’re forecasting based on list prices or best-case scenarios, you’ll likely overestimate. But if you use ASP, you can build a plan that reflects how your revenue really behaves.

A reality check on trade-offs

It can be easy to get excited about sales volume. But high volume with a falling ASP might mean you’re dismantling your own pricing, or burning out your team by chasing lower-value deals. A flat volume line with a rising ASP could mean fewer customers, but more revenue—and a more scalable path forward. ASP can help make it easier to see the cost and value of your trade-offs as they’re happening.

How do you calculate ASP in sales?

To calculate ASP, use this equation:

ASP = Total Revenue ÷ Total Number of Units Sold

The calculation is only as useful as the context you build around it. Here’s what matters when you’re measuring ASP.

Pick a time window that matches your sales rhythm

ASP is time-bound. Looking at it monthly will show short-term trends such as the effect of a new promo or pricing update. Quarterly or annual ASP can help you spot deeper shifts in customer behavior or product mix.

Line up revenue and units

If you’re calculating ASP for your entire product catalog, use total revenue and total units across all products. If you’re analyzing a single product or service, narrow both numbers to match.

Define “units”

In some businesses, one “unit” means a single item. In others, it might mean one subscription activation. If a customer buys three things as a bundle, will you count that as three units or one? Either works, but be clear on the distinction, and use the version that matches the way your business thinks about value per sale.

Decide how to treat discounts and refunds

If you want a transparent view of what customers paid, use net revenue (after discounts and after returns). If you use gross revenue, you’ll inflate ASP and end up with a misleading number. The same goes for refunded units: either leave them out of both the revenue and unit counts, or track them separately so you’re not obscuring the data.

Know the difference between ASP and AOV

ASP and AOV are similar, but they’re not identical. Average selling price is typically per item. Average order value is per transaction. If a customer buys 4 items that are $25 each in 1 order, your ASP is $25, but your AOV is $100. Both are useful, but it’s important to understand the difference.

Once you’ve got the number, monitor the trend

ASP is a measure of what’s happening over time: your average selling price could be growing, shrinking, or staying flat while your costs are rising. Paired with volume, ASP can give you a solid view of what’s really driving your revenue.

How can Stripe Sigma help?

If you’re already using Stripe for payments, you have all the data you need to calculate ASP—and Stripe Sigma gives you direct access to it.

Here’s how that translates into everyday use.

Instant, flexible ASP calculations

Sigma can give you full access to your payment data at a granular level. If you want to know the average sale amount for first-time users who purchased within 14 days of sign-up and used a promo code, you can get that. If you want to compare ASP across 2 products over the last 90 days, you can do that, too.

You can run queries that pull your ASP overall, or break it down by:

• Product line
  
• Geography
  
• Customer segment
  
• Time period
  
• Currency
  

Built-in templates and AI help

If you’re not familiar with structured query language (SQL), that’s not a problem. Sigma comes with prebuilt templates for common metrics, and the AI-powered assistant can turn questions in English into custom SQL queries.

Full automation

Stripe lets you schedule reports to run automatically and deliver results by email. So if you want a weekly ASP analysis to land in your inbox every Monday morning, or a monthly digest to go to your team, you can set that up in a few clicks.

Highly usable results

Your analysis stays in Stripe, which means less bouncing between tools and fewer places for data to get stuck.

Once you’ve got the data, you can:

• Visualize trends over time with built-in charting
  
• Group ASP by week, month, etc.
  
• Schedule reports to run automatically
  
• Share the output with teammates
  

Scalable

Anyone with access to Sigma can use the same saved queries: your marketing team can see ASP by acquisition channel, sales personnel can check average deal size by customer type, and finance teams can schedule monthly reports.

It’s collaborative by design, and the queries stay consistent across the team.

Safe, centralized, and auditable

You don’t need to be emailing CSVs or relying on a spreadsheet that lives on someone’s desktop. Permissions are managed in Stripe, and data stays where it belongs. If someone asks where a specific number came from, you’ve got the query and the data to back it up.

Learn more about Sigma, or get started today.