4 Checkout Strategies to Improve Conversion

Most of American Freight’s furniture retail sales occur in its stores. However, these sales are increasingly influenced by e-commerce. For example, consumers may look online while sitting on their device or on the couch before making a major purchase.

American Freight has taken some steps to improve the online shopping experience and even encourage some customers to shop online, head of marketing Lauri Joffe said Digital Commerce 360.

Each initiative she mentioned led to a “significant one basis point improvement” in overall conversion, which includes customers abandoning their carts online and making a purchase in stores.

American Freight ranks 232nd in the ranking 1000 best. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North American online retailers by online sales. Digital Commerce 360 classifies it as a hardware and home furnishings retailer.

Here are the strategies American Freight uses to improve checkout.

1. One-page layout

Keeping the entire checkout process on one page is “critical,” Joffe said. She called this initiative the most important for conversion.

Your shipping address, billing information and payment information are all on one page. This is a change from about a year ago, when each article was a separate page.

“By default, what we sell is quite a long process,” Joffe explained. “We ask a lot of questions and need delivery information.”

Nevertheless, these details help ensure good results.

“You have to schedule your delivery,” she said. “We want to reduce the time and make it as easy as possible, and most importantly, make sure the customer can see what they have completed and what they have left.”

American Freight makes it a priority to ensure customer progress is visible on the checkout page.

“From an accessibility standpoint, it’s very clear when a step has been completed and what steps remain — and it’s all visible on one page,” Joffe said.

2. Guest checkout

Retailers often want customers to create accounts and share data, but guest checkouts are often driven by consumer preferences, Joffe noted.

“I’m definitely much more obsessed with user experience than data collection,” she said. Consumers choose guest payment for many reasons, including anonymity and not wanting to share details with the merchant. It’s better to let the customer check out as they want, even if it means the salesperson misses out on some data they could use to encourage future purchases.

According to Joffe, about 60% of purchases at the furniture retailer are made through the guest checkout.

3. Providing customers with a wide range of payment options

American Freight has a drop-down menu of accepted payment types on the checkout page, including PayPal, financing, credit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. American Freight presents information in a way that makes it easy for a customer to see all payment options at once and expand any of them for more information, Joffe said.

“We implemented Apple Pay and Google Pay very early because they are one-click mobile solutions,” she emphasized. “We are seeing a huge increase in their percentage of our e-commerce sales.”

4. Abandoned cart emails and text messages

Joffe said American Freight is cautious about contacting customers who abandon carts. According to her, many of them actually end up in stores.

In addition to standard cart abandonment emails, the seller also sends text messages.

“The message is personalized and lets you know you’ll like something before asking for answers to any questions,” Joffe said.

“And then if they actually have a question about what they left in the cart, they write back and there’s literally a conversation between the agent and the customer about what’s going on in the cart,” she continued.

Joffe found that the interaction was more like a conversation than an email, which yielded good results. He recommends this practice to other retailers.

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