Most sales for furniture retailer American Freight happen in its stores. However, those sales are increasingly influenced by ecommerce. For example, consumers may look online before making a large purchase on an appliance or couch. 

American Freight has taken some steps to improve that online purchasing experience and even push some customers to checkout online, chief marketing officer Lauri Joffe told Digital Commerce 360.

Each initiative she mentioned led to “meaningful basis point improvements” to total conversion, which encompasses customers who abandon carts online and make a purchase in stores.

American Freight ranks No. 232  in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by web sales. Digital Commerce 360 categorizes it as a hardware and home improvement retailer.

These are the strategies American Freight employs to improve checkout.

1. Single-page layout

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

The delivery address, billing information and payment information are all on one page. That’s a change from about a year ago, when each piece was a separate page. 

“Just by default, what we sell is a pretty long process,” Joffe explained. “We ask a lot of questions, and we have to have your delivery information.”

Nevertheless, those details help to ensure good outcomes.

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

American Freight prioritizes making a customer’s progress on that checkout page visible.

“From an accessibility perspective, it’s very clear when you’ve completed a step, and what steps are remaining — and it’s all visible in one page,” Joffe stated.

2. Guest checkout

Retailers often want customers to make accounts and share data, but guest checkouts are often consumers’ preferences, Joffe noted.

“I’m definitely a lot more obsessed about user experience than I am about collecting data,” she said. Consumers choose guest checkout for a number of reasons, including anonymity and not wanting to share data with a retailer. It’s preferable to let the customer check out the way they want to, even if it means the retailer misses out on some data they could use to encourage future purchases.

About 60% of purchases with the furniture retailer are made through guest checkout, Joffe said. 

3. Giving customers a breadth of payment options

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

“We were super early adopters of Apple Pay and Google Pay because they’re one-click solutions on mobile,” she emphasized. “We’re seeing a huge uptick in those as a percentage of our ecommerce sales.”

4. Abandoned cart emails and texts

American Freight takes a careful approach to contacting customers who abandon their carts, Joffe stated. According to her, many of them do end up converting in stores. 

In addition to standard abandoned cart emails, the retailer also sends texts. 

“The message is personalized, and it tells you that you’d love something before asking to answer any questions for you,” Joffe said.

“And then if they did have a question, what they left in the cart, they text back and there’s literally a conversation between the agent and the customer on what was happening in that cart,” she continued.

The interaction is more of a conversation than an email, which has produced good results, Joffe said. She recommends the practice to other retailers.

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