What makes Checkout one of the most critical real estate for your online business

The checkout stage is where your lead has the highest intent and is ready to become your customer. Losing them at this stage hurts your business tremendously.

A lot of work goes into making the “IDEAL CHECKOUT” your brand really deserves –
Like any masterpiece,

it requires deliberation, experimentation backed with data, and most importantly ability to drive meaningful insights to effect the right change.

In our first article, we are outlining why checkout is one of the most critical real estate for online brands and how it has a very direct correlation with their key revenue metrics.

How are we re-imagining the checkout real estate for D2C brands?

Our thesis is simple. We help merchants get better at their most revenue-impacting metrics (read: conversion rate, AOV, LTV). This trifecta largely depends on 3 pillars – Friction, Intent, and Trust within the checkout funnel.
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A tool to make your brand grow in revenue

Brands spend their significant budget on devising tactics to grow their revenue, AoV, and LTV. This includes:

• Specific sales campaigns
• New product lines
• Loyalty/reward programs

But more often than not, the existing tools they have do not give them the flexibility to innovate on the above and understand the users they are interacting with deeply. Running experiments, looking at their impact, and rerunning them (in a better way) is the growth loop that many D2C brands struggle to do.

Moro-ever, the real estate where all these culminate into a purchase activity is on your checkout. That is why Shopflo is building a checkout SaaS platform that will help you

• Customize
• Experiment
• Analyze

Wait, the loop continues until you arrive at your “IDEAL CHECKOUT”
All this while, making your checkout intuitive, trust-worthy and friction free.

While stitching together a checkout real estate for your brand, here is a 3-point rule that you should keep in mind:

Friction: The longer the customers spend time in the checkout process, the higher the drop-off rate. Reducing the cognitive load on the users and reducing the number of steps involved (hence giving shoppers little time to second guess their purchase decisions) becomes a non-negotiable for D2C checkout funnels.

Intent: Despite friction in the funnel, what works best in converting purchases in India is increasing intent to buy through savings levers like discounts, freebies etc.

Trust: Trust in D2C brands and the online shopping environment they create plays a major role in consumer behavior to convert. In checkout, it becomes even more critical since this is where the consumer has a monetary action to make.

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Let’s dive a bit deeper into what levers impact the trifecta above:

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Friction:

1. Repeat customers expect to be treated differently than first-time users.

• There is a reason your “grocery person” stays the same despite multiple options. This is because of the familiarity with the entire shopping experience with the store. The same applies in an online world where D2C brands are always trying to strike a personal connection with their customers.
• OTP login flow for repeat customers ensures that Shopflo verified users never have to put in their details twice

2. A wall of address boxes is a major deterrent and reason for drop-offs. We have made the address form more intuitive reducing address page drop-off for new users across our merchants by ~20%
3. Our network effect ensures that you reap the benefit of user information across the D2C ecosystem

Intent:

Building intent is a function of how effectively you are incentivizing your shopper who has reached the checkout. These intentions usually start with the brand’s Top of funnel campaigns and end with manifestation on the checkout.

Shopflo is putting the power back in the hands of brands to strike the right chord with their users via incentives.

• Innovate on your sales campaigns with Flo’s Discount engine
• Run A/B on discounts across the target segment
• Support new discounting through our state-of-the-art Discount creator : Tiered discounts and Automatic freebie additions on checkout 
• Run deep discounting to attract more people through our stacking modules
• Evaluate and analyze your RoDS through our discount analytics
• Effectively redistribute your marketing spend from ads to incentivization levers to ensure that your return on spend is maximized

Shopflo automatically tells your users when a coupon is available for their cart so they don't have to experiment with multiple coupon codes.

Trust:

“Transparency” is the name of the game to build trust. In the current world of 1-day Prime deliveries and free returns, the right messaging at each stage of a shopper’s checkout goes a long way in developing trust in the brand.

Shopflo allows our brands to customize their checkout real estate via:

1. Customizable banners on every checkout page to ensure you give the right messaging based on the action you are expecting the user to take on that page
2. Ability to tag ETD against every Pin-code or address the brand delivers to ensure transparency exists in terms of delivery dates and timelines

Essentially, say goodbye to the information asymmetry that exists in the D2C ecosystem.

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